


OBVERSE VARIATIONS: CODA: Part Two

by ivorygates



Series: Obverse Variations [3]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Girl!Daniel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-09
Updated: 2011-04-09
Packaged: 2017-11-22 16:59:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates





	OBVERSE VARIATIONS: CODA: Part Two

__

_**

VI. Shadow of a Doubt

**_

__

He's cheerful in the shower, and brings her coffee in bed. He hasn't done that -- _someone_ hasn't done that -- in almost a decade. She thinks of Washington. The first days. The first months. It wasn't hope she'd felt then, but certainty, because the war was over and now they could have everything they'd defined in all the years of exclusion. And she'd been wrong, wrong _again_ , reaching for something that vanished as she touched it, as if the future she'd anticipated was as much an illusion as the past she refused to remember. Now her gallery of the past -- on walls and all available surfaces in her bedroom -- regards her silently. She wonders if she ought to have put them away, but the last time she was here before last night was, well ... dressing in a hurried rush the morning after Thanksgiving, thinking about getting to the SGC to find out what was going on. She hasn't been home since.

He hands her the morning cup, then reaches over and picks up the picture of her and Daniel taken at Sammy's. It's on her bedside table. The frame's sterling.

"Didn't know you had any pictures of him."

"A few." Jack never saw them. Daniel was always her guilty secret. Or, rather, the fact she wasn't _finished_ with Daniel. She'd wondered -- in the darkest times -- if Jack had known that.

"Good picture of you."

"I never took a good picture."  
  
"Never could hold still long enough. He was good for you. Daniel." John sets the picture back in its place.

_He left me. They all do. You all do._

"Not much in your fridge, you know. Don't think my place is much better."

"We could go out," she says abstractedly, thinking about what he's said. Who was speaking? John? Jack? How different are they (the eternal question)? Not identical, she knows that already (each time she touches him she knows), but--

"Out, shop, laundry -- can't forget laundry -- throw out the dead turkey that's probably trying to take over my refrigerator..."

She glances up, and John's smiling at her. This is the second time they've slept together. It's really only been a week -- nine days since this began, counting Thanksgiving night and this morning -- and he's spent seven of them as a prisoner on an alien planet. "You'll probably want to keep a robe here. A razor. Things."

His smile widens, acknowledging the things she isn't saying. It's official. She's having a ... relationship. With her dead husband's clone. Her life is back to normal.

#

When they get back from breakfast she finally checks her messages. Once she would have done it immediately upon arrival, but John was here and there was the possibility -- slight but real -- that someone from her Washington days might have called. She doesn't want any relics of that life anywhere near this one, as if by denying it access to her new reality it's possible to simply erase it. But now John's gone back to his unit -- he says cleaning out the refrigerator's something best done without witnesses -- and she has the privacy to discover what non-urgent calls upon her attention have been attempted in the last seven days. Most of the messages are the telephone equivalent of junk mail. One isn't. LaToya Carmichael's called. Several times. 1410 Irvington Court has come on the market.

Dani calls back immediately. LaToya's the realtor Dani worked with to buy her condo; Dani's had her watching for 1410 Irvington since the beginning.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Dr. Jackson. I tried to reach you all last week. Yes, the property you were interested in _did_ come on the market, but it's very attractive, and I'm afraid there's already an offer on it. It looks like it's going to go through."

"What's the offer?" she asks. When LaToya tells her, Dani smiles. "I'll pay the other buyers thirty thousand dollars to withdraw their offer. And I'll pay the sellers fifty thousand more than they're asking. Cash."

"I beg your pardon, Dr. Jackson?"

"You heard me. I'll pay the other buyers to withdraw. I'll pay a premium for the house to make up for the inconvenience. This will be a cash deal. I don't need financing. No fooling around."

"I..."

"LaToya? Are you there?"

"I... Dr. Jackson? Don't you even want to _see_ the house?"

"We're talking about 1410 Irvington Court, right?" Jack's house.

"Well, I, yes, but... Do you realize you're offering over four hundred twenty thousand dollars for a property that's being listed at only $370,000? And only because housing prices in that area have risen so sharply? Ten years ago that property was valued at less than a hundred and seventy. Now, the sellers have made a lot of improvements..."

"Doesn't matter," Dani says briskly. _I'll probably be taking them all out anyway._ "I want the house. I want _that_ house."

"I really think you should see the property," LaToya says, a desperate note in her voice. "Considering your ... unusual interest ... I think I can set up a viewing for this afternoon."

"Yes. Fine. All right. Call me back. " Whatever it takes to shut the damned woman up and get her to close the deal. She tucks the phone into the pocket of her jacket and walks around to John's condo. She realizes telling him about this is going to be awkward, but if the deal goes through -- and she intends to move Heaven and Earth to see it does -- he'll have to find out where she's living -- going to be living -- sometime. The condo was always meant to be only a temporary stopping place, no matter what. So she's not running away from anything. Just tangling herself up further into the Weirdness Zone.

As she reaches his door, her phone rings. "Dr. Jackson?"

"Yes?" It's LaToya.

"I spoke to the sellers. Can you come to the house at twelve-thirty? The seller will be home on her lunch hour and can meet us there. I know this is really short notice, but--"

She checks her watch. It's a quarter to twelve; it will be tight, but the house isn't that far from here, actually. "I'll be there."

She still has John's spare keys. She lets herself in. There's thumping and banging noises from the kitchen. John's on the floor, with a bucket of soapy water beside him. Black plastic garbage bags litter the floor, some half-full. The smell in the kitchen's ... peculiar.

"Compressor blew," he says, seeing her. "The whole thing died at least a couple of days ago. Anyway--"

"I have to go," she says quickly. "I have an errand. It's really important and there's not much time."

"Not the Mountain?" he asks, straightening up.

"It's a house. I have to go look at a house."

"I'll go with you. Don't know why I'm bothering to clean it. Might as well toss it and buy a new one."

"No! I-- I mean--"

He sighs, rests his forearms on his knees. "1410 Irvington?" he asks. She nods. He pulls himself to his feet. Rinses his hands in the sink and dries them. Puts a hand on her arm, looking down at her. "It's okay," he says gently. "I bought the cabin in Minnesota. I wasn't sure how I was going to tell you. Come on, let's go look at the house."

Driving toward the house in his Jeep, she starts to laugh. It's been a while. It feels good. He glances at her curiously. She's not really sure how to explain. She sells the cabin in Minnesota. He buys it. Now she's buying the cabin here. It has a kind of O Henry reciprocity to it.

"Just tell me you aren't the secret owner of this house. That's all I ask," she says.

He shakes his head. "Thought about buying it myself. I guess I wasn't obsessive enough," he says. He sounds amused.

#

LaToya's parked on the street. She doesn't recognize John's Jeep, but she gets out of her car when she sees Dani and walks over to her. Dani introduces John, and LaToya hands her the spec sheet on the property. Dani glances at it, and forces herself to read it, because reading it, or the appearance of reading it, is a way to get LaToya to do what she wants. It's been more than ten years since she was last here; there have been changes; glancing at the house, she notes that the landscaping has been completely changed, and according to the spec sheet, it now has two full baths now instead of a bath and a half. Propane instead of oil. Some passive solar. A new roof. A backyard spa (oh, she's got to see this), and ... granite countertops in the kitchen? (Oh, god, she knows Jack would laugh.) The photos make it look like a totally different house inside; oh, well, she was expecting that. "Looks good," she says. "Let's go."

LaToya conducts them up to the door and rings the bell. The owner's name is Hitchcock; his wife's the one who's home. Meredith Hitchcock regards the three of them doubtfully before letting them in. "I really wish you'd come by a few days ago," she says wistfully. "We've already accepted another offer."

"That's all right," Dani says comfortingly. "I'm going to ask them to withdraw it. May I see the house?"

"Withdraw it?" Meredith Hitchcock seems stunned. "Why would you do that?"

"Because I want the house," Dani answers patiently. "Unfortunately I was out of town when it came on the market." She would have left a limited POA with her attorney if she'd had the least warning something like that was going to happen -- certainly she will when she gets a Team assignment -- but nobody expected Timarek. Or for it to go on as long as it did.

Ms. Hitchcock shows them through the house. The tour's a formality, but (just as on so many alien planets) it's easier to go along with it than to explain why it isn't necessary. Everything's different; new carpet, new paint. (She's going to repaint before she moves in, Dani decides. She doesn't like the new colors.) One of the guest bedrooms is gone -- half of it's has become the expansion of the half bath into a full bath, the other half has gone to add space and a lavish closet to the back bedroom, the one that was always (as she remembers) so dark. But the living room fireplace is still the same. She's glad that hasn't been changed. She thinks of coming back from Abydos, coming here, sitting huddled against its warmth. She knows John has those memories; she wonders what he's thinking right now. The back deck's been substantially expanded, and, as advertised, there's indeed a backyard spa built into it; a Jacuzzi that looks as if it could do everything including make short hyperspace jumps.

"Oh, we're keeping that," John says in her ear.

The kitchen's been gutted and redone. All very modern. Lots of black granite. It's crammed with appliances. "A little gold paint, a couple of open braziers..." John murmurs, too low for anyone but her to hear.

It _does_ bear a more than passing resemblance to the inside of a _Goa'uld_ mothership. Their eyes meet, silently sharing a joke hardly anyone else would get anymore, even the people now at the SGC. And probably nobody else would find funny. The tour continues. The garage is still a garage, but empty. No tools, no junk, no truck, no motorcycle. Just a late-model import sitting in the middle of it, obviously Meredith's. They go back inside. Finished.

"You have a lovely home, Ms. Hitchcock," she says when they return to the living room. "I'm sure you'll be sorry to leave it."

Meredith Hitchcock smiles slightly. "Oh, well. My husband's in the Air Force. We were transferred. You know how it goes."

And Dani's thankful John's tactfully drifted away, so she can pretend that what she's no longer certain is real is true. She smiles. "Oh, yes. Mine was too." She catches Meredith's questioning look. "He died recently." It feels like a lie.

"So you know. I'm sorry, I know this is rude, but if you don't mind my asking, why _this_ house? When LaToya told me what you were willing to pay for it, I just about dropped my teeth. People just don't ... do ... that."

"My husband owned it before we were married. Some of the happiest times of my life were spent here," Dani says. And this is truth.

They leave the house and drive downtown. At the realty office she signs papers, writes a number of checks. Wheels are set in motion. LaToya will call the other party, tell them she has a client who'd like them to withdraw for consideration. Dani gives LaToya her lawyer's card to pass on. She'll have him handle everything possible. Maybe sometime this week she can manage to execute a limited POA so he can close on the house if necessary.

She really needs to update her will. She should make John her beneficiary. The main one, anyway. He might outlive her. It's more than possible. While it's true they're both on a Gate Team, everyone keeps telling her SG-35's a cakewalk, is _safe_. John's far younger than she is; and (aside from that) his body's never been subjected to the things hers has: possession, invasion, poisoning, translation. _'It's not the years, it's the mileage.'_ (That damned movie. Still, it's true.)

Afterward, they drive back to John's place, stopping for a late lunch on the way. He finishes the cleanup of his kitchen -- all windows open wide in the freezing air of the first week of December -- while she huddles on the couch wrapped in his team blanket persuading her lawyer and her financial advisor that whether she has gone crazy or not, this is what she intends to do. She won't be anywhere near broke at the end of buying the house as an outright cash deal, but her accountant's fussing about her retirement position as if it's his own. No point in telling him her plans really don't involve living to retire.

_'It's not really death...'_

"Now I starve," John says cheerfully.

"Now you buy a new fridge, and live at my place until it's delivered, and you won't starve," she corrects. "Which means grocery-shopping. Oh, god. Did you see what they did to the _kitchen_? I don't even know what some of those things _are_." The kitchen counters had been covered in appliances. Obviously Meredith -- or perhaps her husband -- cooks. Dani remembers the old days, the days when she was a visitor to that house. Pizza and Chinese. Jack would barbeque, with varying degrees of success. He could cook eggs -- the bachelor's staple -- but not much else. And at that, he was a better cook than she was.

"Well, her guy's a flyboy. Probably smuggled them out of some black-budget project around here. Electrostatic warp-core toaster. Magnetic phase pasta maker. Variable interlock random access coffee grinder."

"I don't know which is scarier. Hearing you sound like Sammy, or knowing you know what things go in a kitchen."

"So... Home Depot first? Then the store?" he asks.

She wonders if John knows how to cook. It's possible. "I think I'll paint the kitchen walls gold. Bring up the resemblance. I'm pretty sure I still remember the right hieroglyphs, even after all these years," she says meditatively.

#

_"Dani, I don't have time for this. I've got an early meeting."_

She cries in her sleep. She used to wake screaming (once upon a time). She's always had nightmares before a mission got bad, or after it was over. But the mission went bad a long time ago, and is never over, and she can't leave the nightmares till later. Over the years she learned -- you can learn anything with enough motivation -- to be terrified silently. To lie still, even in dreams, when every instinct told her to run. To cry instead of scream, and never make a sound.

_"Oh, god, not again. Come here."_ But there's exasperation under the resignation, and she turns away instead.

She'd wake up those mornings feeling as if she'd been punched in the face (unlike some people she had a real basis for comparison): eyes swollen and painful, throat raw. But Washington was one of the worst places on Earth for someone as allergy-ridden as she was. Everybody knew about Dr. Jackson's allergies. Nobody who saw her before noon on those days, red-eyed and hoarse, thought anything of it. Except, possibly, that she was a closet alcoholic. And they would have been happy to think that on no evidence at all, Washington being the town it was.

If he'd known she cried, and why, he hadn't said. By then they'd spoken as little as possible about things that were real, saving them to be gone into later, when it was safe. A later that never came, so she can neither apologize nor boast, and certainly she'd saved up long lists from both sides of the ledger.

_I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry -- look what I did to make this work, but it's over now..._

It will all have to go unsaid. And so she cries in her sleep. Now. Present day. Jagged memories of the last week and the last several years swirling together. Hadante. Netu. Erebus. Hells and prison planets she has known.

She comes awake with a gasp as John lifts her onto his chest. "Nightmare?" he asks.

"I didn't mean to wake you," she says, and hears panic in her voice. As if he's someone else, and it matters too much.

"Hey, I was awake. I usually get up about now. I run, you remember? I was wondering if I was going to drag myself out today, but I didn't want to wake you. Guess that's settled." But he doesn't move. "Bad one?"

"Prison planets. Negotiating. Just aftershocks." Negotiating. She'd negotiated for years, and nothing she'd done got her the one thing she'd wanted: freedom for her and Jack.

"You okay?"

"Fine. I'm fine. You go ahead." She checks the clock. The numbers are large enough to read even without her glasses. Quarter to five. "Won't be able to run when the snow gets really bad." There's some snow already, but nothing to speak of, and the jogging paths are still clear.

"Treadmill at the Base. I'll keep my hand in." He kisses her cheek, slides out of bed.

#

He runs. It's dark, but the path's familiar. It leaves his mind free to think. She didn't used to cry in the night.

She used to scream.

He was there for some of the nightmares. A few. She didn't have them in the middle of missions, and when else, back in the day, would he have been sleeping with her? Not often. A couple of times. She was in the guest room. Or on the couch. She'd woken him up once. Been so embarrassed she'd tried to leave right them. He'd told her he already knew about the dreams. It was the truth. Carter'd told him about them. And Fraiser. Indy's way -- one of them -- of dealing with the stress they'd all had to deal with on a daily basis, because SG-1 was the flagship team, the one with the heaviest mission schedule, and sometimes they barely got back before they were being sent out again to save the world. Timarek was rough. Sometimes the quiet ones are the roughest. He's sure her sleep was quiet there. And now that she's back, and they're all safe and settled in, nightmares are only to be expected.

Not tears.

She never used to cry, not for anything -- not when Sha're died, not when her whole damned planet got blown to rubble, not when she was tortured... More scars from the time they've been apart, and he hates the fact they're there, and he hates he fact she won't talk about them -- but she never would talk about the personal things. Or ask about them, and that was why -- back in the beginning -- they got along so well. In eight years (all their time together he remembers) she asked him exactly two questions about Sara: once on the first Abydos Mission (obliquely, asking him if he had anyone to go back to), and once when he brought her home, asking him where Sara was, since he'd told her (on Abydos) about Sara and Charlie. And in all the time they knew each other, she never asked him another thing about his personal life, and she expected the same courtesy. He tried to provide it. He got really good at charting her 'no fly' zones over the years. Her past was a big one, even when it became mission-pertinent, and he did his best to forget everything he read in her security file as soon as he read it.

He knows she wonders about him now; he could always read her like a page of print: she knows he's Jack O'Neill, but he's been ... gone ... for twelve years, and most of the time these days he's pretending (pretty successfully) to be somebody named John Nielsen. And she wonders how much of the act isn't an act, and what he's been up to in the last twelve years, and how it's changed him from the man she remembers him being (twelve years ago, when there was only one of him), and from the man she buried less than a year ago. He wonders, too. And he wonders what _happened_ to her in all the time he hasn't been here. There's no one he can ask. Not Carter. And not Indy. He and Carter don't have that kind of relationship any more, and Indy...

The first time he saw her again -- down in her office, that very first day -- she was wearing a skirt, and heels, and makeup, and for half a second he almost hadn't recognized her. She'd looked like Kinsey's wife. Like any of a hundred specimens of perfectly-groomed Washington ladyhood he'd met in his other life. A Washington General's wife. He can't really imagine how Indiana could have turned herself into Dr. Jackson-O'Neill, Washington Insider, but he's starting to suspect what it cost her. She's been ... hardened ... in a way he doesn't like to see. She's got a kind of ruthlessness to her now that was never there before, and he thinks it's a good thing McCluskey's hell-bent on keeping Hamilton for SG-35 even if they _do_ manage to get their hands on her too, because he's not absolutely sure Indy _cares_ about the moral high ground any more as much as she cares about winning.

_What the hell did you do to her, Old Man? What did the Puzzle Palace do to both of you?_

_'We weren't happy.'_

Being unhappy for long enough can break you. Is that what she's looking for beyond the Gate? Herself? Lost innocence? Youth? They're all older now. He's still older than she is, even if he doesn't look it. But there's a difference between getting older and getting hardened. Bitter. Cynical.

Lost.

She'd had plenty of chances to lose her innocence back in the old days, and she never did. No matter how many times SG-1 was tortured, shot down, sold out, betrayed, she'd never lost her essential optimism. People were good. Things would get better. She doesn't have it now. McCluskey's team needs her, but -- he thinks -- she may need them even more. All of them.

It's morning and he runs.

#

On Monday, after the morning's meetings, Dani puts her department in order -- she laid the groundwork well; not a lot of fires to put out there -- then goes to see Sammy. She even makes an appointment. It isn't really urgent.

"Good afternoon, General."

"Every time somebody says that, I still feel like I've been dropped into an alternate universe," Sammy complains. She's only half joking.

"Well remember, there was this one where you _were_ , you know. The General. So you already had a kind of a preview..."

Sammy grins and pushes her glasses up on her nose. It's still always kind of a shock to see Sammy in glasses. "Who knew?" she says.

"So, anyway, I know I haven't qualified yet, but I just wanted to talk to you about a Team posting anyway. Sort of get it out of the way."

"Uh-huh," Sammy says. "You know, I've been offered bribes? I'm starting to feel like a white slaver."

"Bribes?" _That's flattering._

Sammy sighs and leans forward. "Dani, we'll take qualification as a given. Hunnicutt's really confident. I wasn't so convinced. I never thought you'd give up coffee. And you've obviously got something in mind."

Dani takes a deep breath. "SG-35."

"Couldn't see that coming." Sammy studies her, and it's not Sammy who's looking, it's General Carter. Intending to do what's best for the SGC, no matter who it hurts. "Why?"

"McCluskey's asked for me, SG-35 needs me--"

"--and Jack O'Neill's on SG-35. And you're sleeping with him."

Dani looks down at her hands. "Jack's dead. I'm sleeping with John. And yes, he's on SG-35. There's no rule about what civilians do. We aren't going to take it offworld. We know better."

"Do you, Dani? My God, you're buying General O'Neill's old _house_."

How the hell did Sammy find out about that so fast?

"Ongoing security review for Gate Team postings," Sammy explains, seeing her shocked expression. "Unusual transfers of large amounts of cash. It came up. Dani, don't you think all of this ... re-creation ... is a little ... unhealthy?"

Sammy's tone is gentle, but it doesn't stop Dani from getting angry. "Oh, which part? Buying a nice house in a suitable location for my job? One where I was happy? Yes, I'm paying too much for it. I wouldn't have had to do that if I'd been here when it came on the market, but it's the house I want, and I don't see why I should settle. Am I buying it so I can live in the past? I really don't think so, but hey, put me up for a psych review if it will make you feel better. Or come over and look at the place. There've been a lot of changes. Jacuzzi on the back deck now. You should be hoping I'll buy it; we can throw some wild parties there next summer. Or is it John?"

Sammy pulls off her glasses and raises her eyebrows, inviting Dani to go on. Dani sighs, giving up on anger. It's more guilt than anger, anyway, and she hates feeling guilty about something she's going to do anyway. "Okay, not too normal there. I admit that. But... you know what it's like, Sammy. Not having anybody you can really talk to. Having to pretend all the time."

"And with you, he doesn't have to do that?" Sammy asks.

_You've got it exactly backwards._ "Actually, neither of us does. C'mon, Sammy, think about it. There are times I feel like a damned dinosaur around here. Like they ought to box me up, catalogue me, and slap on a label saying 'relic of the early days of the SGC.'"

Sammy makes an amused un-General-like noise. "Oh, it's okay for you. Generals are _supposed_ to be icons," Dani grumbles.

"So are Department Heads," Sammy points out reasonably.

"Yeah, well, we aren't talking about my job, are we? We're talking about my personal life. And why I'm seeing John Nielsen. He isn't Jack." _He is and he isn't._ "He's someone different. He's someone who won't put me up on a pedestal." It's not that she's trying to snow Sammy. She's actually trying to tell her the truth. She owes Sammy-her-friend that. And -- because of the promise she made to John (to Jack) -- she owes the truth to General Carter as well. If she's not completely sure what the truth is, she hopes her friend -- and the General -- will understand.

"General O'Neill always did that, actually," Sammy says.

"No." Not Jack. Never Jack. 'Geek', 'idiot', 'pain-in-the-ass', he'd called her all that and more; he'd trusted her, believed her, believed in her, even loved her, but he'd been the first to see her faults and all her shortcomings.

Sammy shakes her head, smiling. "If you never saw it, you're the only one who didn't. The heart and soul of the SGC -- his words -- and god help anybody who crossed you, because the Colonel would be down on them like the hand of Doom."

"Oh, god, Sammy, we fought _all the time_." Dani protests.

"Sure you did. And then you came and kicked things in my lab, and he went off and yelled at General Hammond. Life at the SGC."

"I never knew that." She wonders who had.

"You weren't supposed to. Chain of command. Keeps things running smoothly."

"A lot of secrets."

"We all had some. You were in love with him, he was in love with you -- and remember when we found out Teal'c had a family? It was a pretty big juggling act, but we managed. At least until the secrets didn't matter any more."

It's true. And though she and Jack shared their secret before the end, they'd managed to set it aside, because keeping it a secret still mattered. And then one day it didn't. She wonders, now, if she's really grateful that day came after all.

"What about your secrets, Sammy?"

"I'm a General. I get to keep mine."

"So."

"So."

They look at each other for a moment.

"Okay. You've made your case. And I'm not giving you a decision right now. Go back to work. I'll let you know. And don't start with me, or you _will_ be going over to the hospital to chat with Dr. Freedman about your taste in men. And I'm sure you'll like him as well as you ever liked Dr. MacKenzie."

Dani sighs and gets to her feet. There are days she's not sure why she came back here.

#

John buys a new refrigerator.

The other buyers for 1410 Irvington Court withdraw. Dani's offer goes through, but the closing and the departure of the current residents, even without a bank involved, will take a while. She should be in by the end of January at the latest, though, even though she intends to repaint first.

She qualifies and goes (techically) into the Assignment Pool for the Teams. There will be quarterly recertifications to pass now. They'd all hated those; a three-day physical.

There's a party when she qualifies. It's combined with Amelia's going-away party. Amelia keeps her secrets to the end. Dani's going-away present to her is a faience necklace. It's from offworld (Sammy has cleared the gift) but anyone who sees it will simply think it's a bad (or at least inaccurate) modern copy of an ancient Egyptian original. Only Amelia will know the truth. She hugs Dani goodbye, telling her she's sure she's leaving AA&T in safe hands.

With December's first real snow, the world turns white. She sets her alarm for half an hour earlier in the morning. Thank heavens she'll have a garage soon.

The neighbors complain about her playing the piano after eight pm.

She hears nothing about her posting.

Christmas is coming, her first Christmas without Jack in almost twenty years, her first Christmas away from Washington in ten, because they were never able to get away from Washington at the holidays; the politics were too important. Just after, yes. The week between Christmas and New Year's, spent at the cabin unless there was a crisis. She froze, he fished (so he said), all in an exhausted silence, dreading being alone together almost as much as going back.

As a small child, she'd never celebrated Christmas. Her family was rarely in the United States for it, and the places they had been hadn't celebrated it. Her parents gave her presents in October, to celebrate the Inundation of the Nile. Jaunting around the world with Nick was much the same. (Except no presents.) The first Christmases after he'd dumped her had been a horror. When she'd gotten to college she'd ignored the holidays, every single one: Christmas, Easter, Groundhog Day... Too much work, nobody to buy presents for, no one to buy presents for her. And not her religion. In Chicago, Simon tried to jolly her into the Christmas spirit. She'd dug in her heels out of sheer perversity.

No Christmas on Abydos.

Jack -- when she'd come back -- had been convinced Christmas was one of the linchpins of Western Civilization, and that she and Teal'c were going to find out all about it, by brute force if necessary -- a Minnesota Christmas transplanted to Colorado Springs: glog, wassail, snowmen, and Yule logs. Strings of popcorn and cranberries. Sammy baked dozens of cookies. Only a day or two before that very first one they'd been somewhere up to their eyes in mud, with Sammy firing her MP5 at something Dani couldn't see -- because her glasses were covered in mud, too -- and then they were all in Sammy's kitchen, and Sammy was up to her eyes in flour, with Jack proving conclusively he really couldn't sing, and Teal'c was asking what the purpose of these rituals were, and she was realizing she honestly didn't know.

"Because we're family," Jack had said.

It was Sammy's house they'd decorated. Jack couldn't quite handle it; somehow they all knew without having to talk about it. A wreath on the door, yes, but not the tree and garlands, not after Charlie. But there was a gigantic tree in Sammy's living room, and decorations everywhere: wreaths and garlands and swags and candles, until the whole place smelled like a northern forest. And Sammy insisted Dani had to spend Christmas Eve with her, so they could hang up their stockings and wait for the animals to talk at midnight.

Her first real Christmas. There were others afterward, of course, but that one stands out, bright and sharp as a memory of childhood. She'd thought the stockings were just for decoration, but Sammy actually filled hers (with what she said were the traditional things) and gave it to her Christmas morning. Candy and small gifts. An orange at the toe. A scarf with an Egyptian motif. She'd never had a Christmas stocking before.

What will Christmas be like this year?

#

John isn't there for Christmas, and she isn't home. SG-35's on the other side of the Gate -- a revisit to a place they've been before. A routine emergency (there actually _are_ such things at the SGC); they'll be okay without a cultural specialist. But it's part of the alert that keeps all Teams and alternates -- which means her -- inside the Mountain from December 23rd on. Something huge is cooking -- Sammy's been on the phone all day, and Teams keep going out, back to places they've been before -- and finally Sammy calls her into her office. There's an open canopic jar sitting on her desk.

Dani recoils, taking a step back, because canopic jars mean _Goa'uld_ , and an open one means a _Goa'uld_ was in there and isn't now. Which means it could be in Sammy. In which case, they're all dead.

"It's okay," Sammy says. "SG-1 brought this back through the Gate about two hours ago. Empty. I wanted you to see it."

"Sure," Dani says, not moving.

"Want to check the back of my neck for an entry scar?"

It would be a good test, because any _Goa'uld_ old enough to be in a canopic jar is probably old enough not to think of going in through the mouth instead.

"Pass me your gun first."

Sammy slides her service automatic across her desk and steps back. She hasn't called for the SFs yet, and that's a plus. Dani steps cautiously forward and snatches it. Oh, from now on she's going to go armed every time she comes to see Sammy. She backs up and checks it as quickly as she can. From the weight it's fully loaded. Not an _intar_. She flips off the safety. Just have to pray it isn't loaded with blanks.

Sammy turns her back and spreads the hair at the nape of her neck. No scar. "A little paranoid?" she asks, turning back.

"Cautious." Dani doesn't offer to give the gun back, and Sammy doesn't ask for it.

Dani approaches the desk, at first only glancing at the jar. But a group of symbols catches her attention, and despite herself she looks, translating automatically. _'Here awaits Ereshkigal in expectation of a glorious resurrection...'_

"SG-1 went to P5X-484 on a routine mission. They encountered a tribe of nomads, the Hansard, similar to ones we met on Vis Uban. They're primitive, but their shamans -- for lack of a better word -- know how to operate the Stargate, and they travel from world to world scavenging and trading. Captain Sands wanted to see what they had. One of the things they had was this," Sammy says.

The jar. _'On the day of her liberation shall she rise up on wings of fire to throw open the Seven Gates, and a thousand ‹untranslatable› shall follow her...'_

"Did they remember where they got it?"

"Yes. SG-1 has the address. The Hansard say it came from a large room full of similar jars, but this one was the prettiest."

_'From each print of her foot shall rise serpents, and her children shall devour the stars...'_

"Oh, god." Dani can read the inscription easily, and she's sure Sands could too. "A _Goa'uld_ Queen."

The System Lords and most of the lesser _Goa'uld_ have been destroyed, the nurseries and temples where the _Goa'uld_ larva were nurtured before implantation are long gone. By now, all of the surviving Jaffa have been switched over to tretonin, the drug the _Tok'ra_ invented to save them from their dependence on the _Goa'uld_. Someday genetic engineering might make that unnecessary as well, and the Jaffa will be truly free. But ever since the Empire fell, she's known the _Goa'uld_ could come back to haunt them. They've always had a sort of bolt-hole: the canopic jars with their stasis fields, in which a living _Goa'uld_ can wait for centuries, even millennia, until it's freed. If a cache of those had survived anywhere -- they'd all known it -- the _Goa'uld_ would survive. And if even one _Goa'uld_ Queen survived, their numbers would begin to increase again. Exponentially. Ever since Dakara fell to the Jaffa she's begged for an ongoing SGC mission to seek out and destroy the last of the _Goa'uld_ ; to search for caches of canopic jars. But Washington and the IOA chose to allocate the SGC's resources elsewhere. The SGC struggled through years of budget cuts while money was spent on Atlantis and the Starfleet, and even Jack hadn't agreed with her about the urgency of it; he'd been fighting not only to keep the SGC going, but to keep it out of the hands of the civilian oversight committee. He hadn't had the clout to push what he'd once -- in an unguarded moment -- called her 'pet project.'

Everyone (Jack, Homeworld, the IOA, the SGC) felt the snake-hunting could be left to the _Tok'ra_ and the Jaffa: the unvoiced assumption was that the _Goa'uld_ were simply no longer Earth's problem. Only the _Tok'ra_ pretty much stopped talking to them after Dakara, and the Jaffa followed the path of emerging nations everywhere, etiolating their ties with what they saw as an entrenched power with Colonial ambitions (Earth). If either group was pursuing the _Goa'uld_ \-- successfully or otherwise -- they weren't telling the _Tau'ri_ about it, leaving the _Tau'ri_ just as blind -- and nearly as helpless -- as they'd been before Apophis walked through the Gate the first time back in 1996. Because -- as Dani's been telling everyone for years (and has been telling Sammy ever since she walked back in here) -- all it will take to put them all right back at Square One is for _just one Goa'uld Queen to have survived._

And apparently one has.

"The jar was empty when the Hansard found it?" she asks tightly. She doesn't bother with recriminations. Now isn't the time, and it's too late for them anyway.

"Apparently. SG-1 found no traces of _naquaadah_ anywhere except on the jar itself, and none of the nomads reported any strange behavior from any of their members either at the place where they found the jar, or just afterward."

"What about the other jars? Open or closed?"

"The Hansard didn't notice. They didn't think it was important. Dani, what do we know about the lifecycle of the _Goa'uld_?"

_Now_ the SGC wants to know. She damps down an angry thrill of triumph. This isn't Sammy's fault. But oh, god, if only she could have gotten backing ten years ago...

The story of her life.

"Not much," she says, sighing. "We never got anything substantial about the _Goa'uld_ out of Simon. Teal'c told us everything he knew, and I don't think most of the Jaffa ever knew much more. They know they carried a _prim'ta_ for about seven to twelve years before it matured and they needed a new one. How long it ... exists ... before it's ready for implantation ... I don't think they know. Maybe the Temple priestesses did, but ... you know what happened to them."

Sammy doesn't quite grimace, but they've both seen the reports. Jaffa Liberation was messy. Unexpected, happened too quick, came out of nowhere in a matter of days. Not everybody was happy about it, and a lot of Jaffa took the opportunity to settle old scores among themselves. The _Goa'uld_ had set them at each other's throats for millennia, and the old feuds died hard.

"We know a Queen's capable of parthenogenesis. If Ereshkigal was mature, she's already out there spawning. From the inscription and the name, that's the way to bet -- Ereshkigal's the Sumerian Goddess of the Underworld, sister of Ishtar. She rules over the dead and can revive them at whim. She's not going to need Jaffa, but she'll want them -- we know from what we learned from our study of the _Goa'uld_ that it increases the viability of the _prim'ta_ for later implantation."

She makes the evasive circumlocution automatically, and her mind only catches up a moment later, realizing what she's said. That wasn't something they learned by study. _Hathor_ told them. Hathor told _her_. And Hathor is why Jack -- maybe -- didn't take her obsession with surviving _Goa'uld_ Queens as seriously as he might have, and she never would have told Jack about Hathor -- _everything_ about Hathor -- except Daniel asked her to, and she'd trusted Daniel, and those are three things that she doesn't want to think about right now, so she forces her mind back to the inscription. There are a lot of scarily-interesting things about Ereshkigal, among them that the other gods of the Sumerian pantheon were constantly warned against having sex with her, because if they did they'd be in her power forever, unable to leave her domain. Is Ereshkigal more powerful than Hathor? They've always assumed Hathor was also Ishtar and (therefore, probably) Ereshkigal. The attributes matched. But Ishtar descended to the underworld and defeated her twin sister through trickery. Poison, and pretty men.

Sammy sighs. "That's about what I thought. Can I have my gun back now?"

Dani realizes she's still holding it. She flicks on the safety and slides it across the desk. Sammy takes it and slips it back into the drawer.

"We're checking Jaffa homeworlds now -- the ones we're allowed to visit, anyway -- to see if there have been any large-scale unexplained disappearances. I don't really want to let the Jaffa Council in on this just yet. Frankly, I'm afraid to. There's a lot of pressure on the Council to go back to the old ways. A lot of Jaffa aren't really happy with the effects of tretonin."

"Teal'c wasn't, at first," Dani says.

"They're convinced they can use the symbiotes and still not bring the _Goa'uld_ back."

Dani knows that. It was in the Briefing Book she read the first week she came back. Before that, of course, she'd been kept guessing about the offworld political situation, having to piece things together from the consulting work she did at the SGC. Landry could have told her more, of course, but he hadn't. Jack -- she's sure -- asked him not to. Jack hadn't wanted her to know. One more thing to fight about.

"Someone will slip up. And it will only take one." One symbiote taking over its host to become a _Goa'uld_. She, Jack, Sammy, and Teal'c all had this talk almost a dozen years ago. They'd thought they'd won the argument then. And if they hadn't won the argument with the Jaffa, at least she thought she'd won it with Jack, but ... apparently she hadn't won that one either.

"I know. So when SG-35 comes back, I'm sending you off to PR9-878 to see what you can find. Merry Christmas, Dani. I'm giving you the team you asked for," Sammy says.

A Team assignment, and it's SG-35, but she's too frustrated right now to feel any sense of victory. Too many lost battles in the past, all shaping this new one yet to fight. But she owes Sammy something. "I, ah, um, well. Thanks? I think. But shouldn't SG-1...?"

"You and Nielsen have the most experience with the _Goa'uld_ of anyone I have left. It has to be you. You'd better go do a refresher course on our old friends. It's been a while."

"Yeah. Okay. Don't worry, Sammy. We beat them once." It's what you say. It's what Jack said, at that very first briefing twenty years ago, sitting across the table from General Hammond. _'We beat them once.'_ She wonders if Sammy remembers.

Sammy smiles. New lines. The blonde hair's going grey. Fifty-two next birthday. "That's my line. Now go. Take the jar with you. I'd rather not look at it any more."

#

She takes the jar back to her office and stares at it for a while. Everything old is new again. A _Goa'uld_ Queen out there somewhere. One who makes Hathor look nice. She shudders, and swallows hard. Hathor took so much from her. An innocence she hadn't known she still possessed after Sha're's death, after Skaara's kidnapping and enslavement. The chance -- _ever_ \-- for children. Hathor ... defiled ... her relationship with Jack (not a relationship, not then, not consciously) to the point that all she could do to make the pain of that cruelty go away was to attempt to remake herself into someone who didn't care, to bury the possibility of Jack beneath nights of disposable men, making herself (unconsciously, unexaminedly) impossible for him. Because she'd already had an image in her mind, buried deep beneath the surface, of what Jack wanted -- or if not that, of what he deserved.

And then Daniel came from his world to hers. In so many ways, he was her mirror image. In his world, _he'd_ been the one in Hathor's bed, not Jack. And knowing that -- knowing _Daniel_ \-- allowed her to forgive herself at last, to heal. To be worthy of Jack? she wonders. Or just to give up unrealistic illusions? Because Jack -- she discovered later -- had always known what she'd been doing; all the bar pick-ups and one-night-stands; although he hadn't known why. It made no difference to him. Nor does it make a difference to John, who knows what Jack knew. But there's one thing John doesn't know, because Jack never knew it until John was long gone: the reason she hates Hathor far more than he ever will.

At least this _Goa'uld_ isn't Hathor. At least there's that.

#

He checks his watch. Christmas Day. It would have been their first Christmas together. Instead, he's on 591 because there's been a change of government and the new regime's having second thoughts about what the last one did. So they're back doing the exact same negotiations they did three months ago, except that this time, he and Hicks are superfluous. They're cooling their heels in a dormitory while the Colonel and the College Boy meet with the Alarine First Speaker and his advisors.

"You think we're going to get her?" Hicks asks.

"I think the Colonel's planning to win her in a poker game." It's been two weeks since she qualified, and Carter hasn't assigned Indiana anywhere yet.

It really sucks to be here. He'd had plans for Christmas. They'd sort of included the whole tree -- wreath -- garlands business, but Indy doesn't own a single decoration. Some of the ornaments on Carter's tree every year were 'hers', but she doesn't have them. Maybe Carter does.

Indy said she didn't want anything to do with Christmas when he brought the subject up; said she was tired of it. She'd used to love it. It isn't hard to figure out one of the things that accounts for the change. She got more cards this year than anybody he's ever seen. They started coming right after Thanksgiving, a lot of them forwarded from Washington, a lot of them addressed to 'General and Dr. O'Neill.' (Well, at least they'd given Indy her proper title.) A few were thick enough to contain a few sheets of paper, maybe a photo. Most of them she hadn't even opened before dropping them, not into the garbage, but into the heavy-duty document shredder in her office. What kind of woman _shreds_ her incoming Christmas cards? The kind (it's not hard to figure out; he's the one who trained her, half by example) who probably would have simply thrown them out if she wasn't afraid that one John Nielsen, new boyfriend, might sort through the trash to find out what she and the Other Guy had been up to for the last ten years. It became something of a ritual, any night they'd come home to her place together. Collecting the mail, the thick stack of obvious Christmas cards, then off to the shredder. She didn't object to him watching. Hard to keep it a secret if you weren't willing to have the things in your house over a minute.

_"Too bad you don't have a fireplace,"_ he'd said. _"You could burn them."_

_"Next year I will,"_ she'd said calmly. _"Burn them. I'll have a fireplace then."_ As if shredding the cards she received was the most rational act in the world.

He tried to talk to her about it, not sure where to start but knowing there was something badly wrong. She was beyond angry; that was always when she destroyed things with such careful thoroughness. And she'd agreed this was odd behavior, and said she was being silly and childish, and that Christmas had always been a rough time. 'Always' meaning in the life she's had he doesn't know about, because before that -- for the seven years from her return from Abydos to the point where they told him he wasn't Jack O'Neill and sent him off to live someone else's life -- she loved Christmas. Bumbled through it like an alien, bitched about being caught offworld for it, thought the cookies were the best part, and kept meticulous lists of presents owed. So this is new, and he doesn't like what it tells him about what's happened to her in the time they've been apart.

He likes it even less when the cards stop coming altogether. _All_ her mail does, because she's gotten an accommodation address of some kind and is getting her mail forwarded there. Out of sight, out of mind. Problem solved, in Indy's simple world. She can be remarkably childish for a woman with four PhDs. He's known that for years. But telling her to be a grownup about things isn't going to solve anything. He suspects a few too many people -- the Other Guy maybe even included -- have told her that a few too many times over the years. God knows _he_ told her every variation on it when they were together -- so to speak (because they were never together, not that way). He was trying to keep her alive. But they're way past the time for 'chin up, grow up' lectures now. And what he's seen from her lately isn't being alive. It's a little too close to just existing, and he wonders if that's why Carter's been holding off on assigning her.

Okay, she _really_ didn't like Washington. He's got that. And she doesn't just want to burn the bridges between herself and her previous life, she wants to drop a nuke on them. He's not quite sure what she's afraid he'll find out, though. He thinks what happened when the cards started coming was that she was reminded of the past and panicked, because the past hurts too much. He wishes it didn't. He wishes she'd tell him it did. Because together they could fix things. It's not her fault, or the Other Guy's, that Life treated them badly, and how could either of them have done less than their best? Sometimes you do your best, and the mission takes you down anyway. Sometime the only thing that can save you is letting someone in to where it hurts. Not that he was ever good at that, especially back in the beginning. But she'd barged right on in anyway, ignoring all the warning signs. He remembers the first Abydos mission; too screwed-up over Charlie to realize he was staging an elaborate suicide. She saved his life twice over and never quite knew it. He can't help her now if she doesn't let him in -- not just into her life, but into her past.

"Helluva place to be on Christmas," Hicks says.

"I've been worse," he answers, thinking of Cambodia, Nicaragua, Iraq. Hicks looks at him curiously, and he reminds himself _John_ wasn't any of those places. Hadn't even been born, in fact.

"You're thinking about her, right?" Hicks says.

"Oh yeah. Being locked up on an alien planet always makes me think about Dr. Jackson," he says. Substituting one name for another's nearly automatic. Standard field precautions.

Hicks doesn't say anything else. John's pretty sure Hicks knows he and Indy are dating. It's a fine line; they aren't hiding in closets because they don't need to, but familiarity breeds the possibility his cover will slip a little too much for comfort. So maybe the two of them are more distant with each other than they'd need to be if they were two other people. And maybe it's just as well, if she wants to be posted to the same team he's on. He knows she's asked for that, and so has McCluskey, who _definitely_ knows he and Indy are dating, and has already asked him if it will be a problem in the field. He's said no. He's got plenty of experience in compartmentalizing. Years of it.

Hicks lies down on the bed he's been sitting on -- you sleep when you can on a mission. John goes over and stares out the window. Everything's green. It's snowing at home. He wants to go home.

#

She stares at the jar for a while longer, but there's nothing more to be gotten out of it: it's a typical _Goa'uld_ stasis jar. She goes and finds Sands: SG-1's stuck in the Mountain for Christmas Day along with everyone else, but they'll be going out again tomorrow. He has little to add to what Sammy told her, but she pumps him for every detail.

The Commissary's done its best to put together a holiday meal, but it's just a reminder, really, that they're all here instead of somewhere else. A lot of people have families they'd like to be with. At least she doesn't have that.

After dinner she does her workout -- Christmas Day, but she'd feel odd if she skipped it -- then goes back to her office. It's an illicit thrill, working overtime, but the only other place she can go is her quarters. She hunts through the mainframe, finds her ancient sound-files on _Goa'uld_ , plays some of them back, and tries out the sharp barking phrases in the stillness of her office. It's been a while since she's either heard or spoken the language, but she was fluent once and it comes back quickly. You can throw a _Goa'uld_ off-balance for a second or two if you speak to it in its own language.

She's still sitting there not doing very much at all -- she's tired and it's late, but they're all still stuck here and she's decided on-Base quarters is the most depressing place on Earth, worth avoiding for as long as possible -- when Lt. Andrews comes into her office.

"Oh, hey, Dr. Jackson. I've been looking all over for you."

"Limited number of places I could be, Lieutenant. Merry Christmas," she adds. A belated afterthought.

"Yeah, I, um, thought you'd already be in quarters. I was hoping SG-35 would get back, but..." He sets something down on her desk. A wrapped box, large and flat. Christmas present. She stares at it blankly. Did he get her a present? Why?

"It's not from me," he says quickly. "It's from Nielsen. You know? He's been joking for weeks that he'd probably end up stuck offworld for Christmas and wouldn't be able to give you your present on time, and, well, I had to get some stuff out of his lab and I saw it on his desk, and... Nobody likes being stuck here on Christmas, Dr. Jackson, and I was hoping he'd be back, but it's almost midnight, and--"

That late? No wonder she's tired. She smiles. "Thanks, Bobby. All my presents for everybody are still at home on top of the piano. When I came in here on Tuesday I thought I was going to get to go home at the end of the day."

"So did I," Lieutenant Andrews sighs. "Well, not like Kayla isn't used to it by now, and at least we're on the same continent. Anyway, good night. And Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas," she echoes automatically. When he leaves she shuts down her computer and locks up her office and goes to her quarters, taking the box with her. Large and flat, but not heavy.

Waiting for John would be the polite thing to do. She'd rather open it in private in case she needs to be tactful about his gift later. Jack was always appallingly bad at presents, and time cannot wither nor custom stale the infinite inevitability of the human male. She guesses lingerie, and she's right, as she finds when she opens it a few minutes later, safe behind closed doors. Despite everything that's happened today, it makes her smile. Oh, the endless triumph of male optimism over practicality. Or reason. Or common sense. She isn't twenty or even thirty: the satin and lace will fit, all right. But it won't suit. Maybe it never would have.

There's something else in the box, carefully taped to the bottom so it wouldn't shift. Small box. Jewelry box. Ring box. She works it free and opens it, feeling sick and cold at the pit of her stomach. _Oh, no, Johnny. Not this. Please._ An engagement ring, simple and perfect. _No._ She sets the box down. Her hands are sweating.

_How can he...? Why would he...?_ But she thinks back to a conversation she had with Jack two years before John's 'birth' and she knows the answer to that. _Wait for me._ She closes her eyes. They burn. They ache. Overwork and eyestrain; she suspects a new prescription lies in her near future. It's a pity she never had the surgery -- they could have corrected most of her deficit and let her go to a weaker prescription -- but even now it's contra-indicated for anyone engaged in contact sports, and being on a Gate Team certainly qualifies. It's why she didn't have it done while she was on SG-1. And she's back on a Gate Team now. She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes, knowing she's trying to avoid the point, but the one thing she's never been able to do is stop _thinking_ , and she can't stop now.

Rings.

Symbols.

Promises.

In Venice the Doge marries the city by casting a ring into the harbor.

She doesn't have her rings from Jack. Up at the cabin, after he'd died, one day she'd taken them both off and thrown them into the lake. Thrown them as far as she could. They'd flashed in the hot summer sunlight, separating as they flew, and fallen into the water with a sound too small to hear. She's not sure why she did it. To feel something, whether relief or pain, perhaps, but she hadn't felt anything at all. She'd loved him, loved what the rings represented, even at the worst, even at the end. Probably that's why. They belonged in a place he loved. It was her memorial to him, more than the public show at Arlington. And now John wants to give her a ring. To begin again, with everything such rings represent. _Pain and betrayal and sorrow and confusion and loss._ And love? Always. But -- somehow -- never enough joy. And though she hasn't believed -- not since long before she met Jack -- that the world keeps its promises and pays what it ought to owe, surely Jack, of all people, should have received more? Even if _she_ hadn't deserved happiness, surely _he_ had?

She stares down at the glittering stone, bright against black velvet. The stars in the night sky on Abydos were that bright. She remembers them clearly, even after so many years. As bright as the stars in the night sky in Minnesota in winter; as bright as the stars in Jack's back yard in Colorado Springs. He brought her there her first night back from Abydos, bundling her up like lost luggage and carrying her off like a modern-day Orpheus, up out of the Mountain and into the world she'd left behind. She spent three months there, sleeping alone in his bed while he was lost on Edora. Slept on his couch more than once, over the years (the couch is gone now, worn out and thrown out years ago). She remembers barbeques on the deck that isn't there any more. Frisbee in the yard with Teal'c and Sammy. Hockey games and pizza. It was almost her home -- their home together. It should have been. In what universe _could_ it have been?

She'd been going to ask John -- over Christmas -- to come and live with her. He could keep his condo and rent it out; freedom's the most important thing she can imagine. Of course she'll be selling hers. And going home. But living there would be more convenient for both of them -- not only the domestic arrangements, but it's a half-hour commute instead of a forty minute one and a straight shot to the Mountain. The houses in that area back up on the Reservation, the area's quiet and secure. She'd been pretty sure he'd say 'yes'. And even now -- even seeing the ring, knowing she's going to refuse it -- she can't imagine not asking him, though she's no longer certain of his answer.

She looks at the box and sighs, closing it gently. She doesn't care if it's irrational. She doesn't care if she's a textbook case of avoidance and denial. At this precise moment, she doesn't even care if she hurts him. She writes one word on a scrap of paper, tucks it into the small velvet box, puts the box into her pocket, and then goes to find an SF to let her into John's lab for just a moment.

Merry Christmas.

#

 

 

__

_**

VII. Treasure of the Sierra Madre

**_

__

SG-35 gets home on the 26th. Dani's in a briefing with SG-18 when they do. So far nobody's been able to find any missing Jaffa populations, and Sammy's finally releasing personnel to go home, but the SGC's still on alert. They're going to have to brief the _Tok'ra_ as soon as SG-35 gets back from the recon to this (hopefully still deserted) _Goa'uld_ site. The mission's set for 0700 tomorrow morning. That means the MALP will go an hour earlier; they'll want to be here for that. Up early and a mad dash to the Mountain. Just like old times.

She sits in on SG-35's debrief. They're her team now. (The Alarine mission went smoothly; they get to keep the loot.) Sammy gives them the news she's been attached. Everyone's delighted but John, who's obviously already been down to his lab and seen her note. A great way to start her new posting; she's always had a terrific sense of timing.

Sammy tells them they'll be going to PR9-878 tomorrow morning to check out a cache of _Goa'uld_ canopic jars and see what they can learn. "--based on what we already know, we have reason to believe there's a _Goa'uld_ Queen's at large. Dr. Jackson will brief you in more detail tomorrow."

"See you in the morning," John tells her as they all stand for their dismissal. Nothing more is said.

#

His own fault. Bad timing, bad luck. Andrews was trying to do him a favor. The box was in his lab because Indiana has no self-discipline about presents and isn't above burglary; it was on top of his desk because he'd been going to take it home that day. The combination of emergency mission, full alert and well-meaning idiot did the rest. A combination that probably won't happen twice. And only needed to happen once. There was just one word, written on a scrap of paper, tucked into the box waiting on his desk.

_'No.'_

If he'd been able to give the ring to her in person he could have talked her into it, John thinks. Eased her into the idea. Convinced her it was the right thing to do -- hell, even promised to clear it with Carter and McCluskey first and gotten their okay. He knows she wants SG-35 more than anything, and now she's got that. Normally Carter would have told McCluskey about the new assignment first, and McCluskey would have told them, but Carter has to have told Indy while they were gone. Wouldn't've had a choice; not if Indy was going to prep for the mission they've got in the morning. _Goa'uld_ Queen on the loose. Just like old times.

He knows the Empire fell; he's caught up on what's now ancient and still highly-classified history since his return to the SGC. The _Goa'uld_ \-- everyone says -- are gone, except for one or two or three -- all incapable of reproduction -- hiding in distant corners of the Galaxy. Without their slave armies and interplanetary domains, not a real problem. The fact that most of the Galaxy now resembles one of the less-attractive Third World countries is something nobody mentions. Half of the Empire was delighted to be freed of _Goa'uld_ tyranny and raids, the other half's incapable of surviving in freedom. And the SGC's too small -- and face it, Earth's culture is too primitive -- to prop up the culture and economy of thousands of worlds, some of which they barely know about. In the last ten years, the Galaxy's slowly been going to hell, and the only thing saving Earth's butt now is that the Asgard have finally been freed up to play Intergalactic Red Cross and none of the misery's interstellar in nature. The Jaffa Free Nation has the only remaining space fleet of any size, and they're only interested in other Jaffa, not in all the humans out there who've had the foundations of their little words kicked out from under them. In short, if the snakeheads _do_ manage to come waltzing back in somehow, there isn't a whole lot to stand in their way. And there are lot of people who will -- as usual -- think any change has got to be an improvement.

He knows it. Indy knows it. The fact they've just gotten a live hand grenade dropped in their professional laps doesn't do a lot to improve the domestic situation. But if they're walking into a nest of snakes in the morning -- real or potential -- they don't need to spend the night before getting into it with each other for any reason. They've put their personal lives aside before. They can do it again.

#

She goes home and plays the piano. She doesn't care what the neighbors say. She'll be out of here in a couple of weeks. Half the living room's full of boxes -- she's packed her books herself this time. (The Air Force will finish the packing on the day itself, but if she packs the books herself she has a fighting chance of being able to find them again. And some of them are fragile.) The ungiven gifts are still on top of the piano. She'll take them in to work with her tomorrow. They're all for people at the SGC anyway. If she'd realized she'd get her posting, she would've bought gifts for Hicks, Hamilton and McCluskey. There's still time to get a bottle of Scotch for the Colonel at least. No. Bourbon's McCluskey's drink, she remembers. Sammy (Dani's sure) will know her brand. Bourbon, then. And New Year's gifts. If she has time to shop.

If they're all still alive after tomorrow.

She waits for John to come over or call, but he doesn't, and after a few hours she realizes he won't. What could she say to him, after all? And they've got a mission tomorrow, her first with SG-35. An important one, and it's going to be riding on her skills and experience. She feels a wave of absolute panic, and for a moment wants nothing more than to get in the car and drive, drive for hours, until she's miles away, is anywhere but here. But she doesn't. She sets both alarms for an hour earlier than her usual time, makes herself a cup of cocoa, and goes to bed. When the alarms jar her awake hours later, her pillow's wet, her throat hurts, and her eyes are swollen with crying. Nightmares.

No one to hold her in the night.

#

They step through the Gate onto PR9-878. They're outdoors. An open field. No path. They're looking for a big building about three kilometers away, on top of a hill. Neither the MALP nor the UAV has seen any sign of activity, which is the way it always starts. McCluskey takes point, Hicks takes drag. Hamilton's up beside McCluskey, and all three of them are loaded for bear. She and John -- the civilians -- are in the middle, sharing the rocking chair slot. But John's carrying a pack loaded with enough explosives to take down just about anything short of a Stargate, and both he and she are carrying zats in addition to their Glocks. She's carrying her quarterstaff, but probably nobody should expect any Robin Hood moves out of her; she's out of practice there.

She told them all about Ereshkigal in the morning briefing, just in case she's come back here. Gave them a quick run-down on the _Goa'uld_ in general, too -- the snakes aren't really current events these days. Set ground rules. Nobody goes out of sight of anybody else this mission. Nobody but her touches anything. They should be okay.

Ra imprisoned Hathor in a sarcophagus four thousand years ago. Dani once theorized that Hathor was the archetype that inspired all the Earthly myths of love goddesses. If she was, what does that make Ereshkigal? Sister, goddess of the Underworld? Is Ereshkigal Hathor's sister? If Hathor imprisoned her sister in a canopic jar it would have to have been even longer ago than she was imprisoned. But the inscription doesn't quite say that, does it? _'Here awaits Ereshkigal in expectation of a glorious resurrection...'_ Doesn't make it sound a lot like she was imprisoned. It makes it sound as if she went into the jar _voluntarily_. If so, why? And when? And did she know what she was doing, or was she tricked?

"Looks like that's it," McCluskey says.

"Huh," she says, looking at the building on the hill -- more of a rise -- ahead.

"Dr. Jackson?" They're not on first-name terms yet.

"Ah... the exterior presentation of the structure doesn't conform with other examples of _Goa'uld_ surface architecture I've seen."

"Meaning?"

"It doesn't look like their usual kind of place. I have no idea why." It's plain and square, stark, grey, and Cyclopean, as if someone were determined to build something with no cultural indicators whatsoever. Looks as if it's made of natural stone, but that's all she can tell from here, and even that might be incorrect.

"It looks like it's on an artificial hill. So there may be more stuff underground once we get inside," she adds.

"Okay. We do a perimeter sweep before we go inside. Hicks, you're with me."

"Colonel?"

"Dr. Jackson?"

"We should all go."

McCluskey regards her for a long moment. Her eyes are blue-grey, and Dani can't tell what she's thinking. "All right. I love a parade. Let's go see the raree show."

They circle the base of the hill. Nothing to be seen. The terrain is deserted all the way to the horizon, and the building is a featureless stone block on every side but the entrance side. It's composed of stone blocks about the size of refrigerators, all set together without mortar. They secure the perimeter anyway, setting up a ring of infra-red line-of-sight sensors that should alert them if anything breaks the beam between them. So they'll be warned in case of all chipmunks, stray leaves, and attacking _Goa'uld_. It takes almost an hour.

"You're jumpy today," John says. It's just about the longest sentence he's addressed to her since they arrived this morning.

"I'm terrified," she answers honestly. "Just what I wanted for Christmas. Snakes."

He smiles sourly. He doesn't like the _Goa'uld_ any better than she does. "You'll settle if there's trouble," he tells her. He knows she will. Jack knew. She sets the thought aside.

When they've finished setting up the sensors, it's time to go inside. Now it's her turn to take point. She leaves her quarterstaff outside; she needs both hands free. McCluskey's right behind her, and John's at her shoulder.

"Didn't the Hansard just walk right in here?" Hamilton asks, as she hesitates, peering into the dimness, searching for pictures or writing on the arches or entryway walls. There's nothing.

"In and out, just ginger peachy," John says.

"Quiet," McCluskey says.

There's a short hallway. Twenty feet wide, sixty feet high, solid walls, and -- she shines her light up -- solid ceiling. No markings of any kind. She stops, takes a marble out of her pocket and sets it on the floor to check for grade. It doesn't roll at all. The floor's perfectly level. The hallway opens into an enormous room, lit by a skylight. The room is full of canopic jars. There are step-shelves built into the back wall, and they're racked on those as well as scattered all over the floor.

"Where's Sigourney Weaver when you really need her?" John says. He's got a hand-scanner out, checking for energy-signatures. He shakes his head. Nothing. She stands still in the doorway, looking over the scene before she goes in. Hamilton starts to say something and stops.

"You know," she says after a moment, "this doesn't make sense."

"Why is that, Dr. Jackson?" Colonel McCluskey says.

"Well," Dani says calmly, "where are the force fields? The traps? Even a locked door or two would be nice. I can see them letting us in so easily, but as far as I can tell, we can also leave any time we want to, and I'm a little disturbed that we seem to be able to get at all of the jars, not just one or two. John? How many jars would you say were in there?"

"Two hundred. Three. Maybe more," John says. His voice is almost disinterested.

"And there wasn't any sign that the Stargate was a ritual center. And we all know how the _Goa'uld_ love decoration. This place has ... nothing."

"What? You think they were all kidnapped? Or... _Goa'uld_ -napped?" John asks. There's a faint note of derision in his voice.

"Or... this place wasn't finished at the time of Anubis' War. And one of the things that kept it safe from him was the fact it had no energy-signature to trace. If I'm right, we won't find any technology here, but we may eventually find a lot of skeletons." Because whoever built this place would have been executed right here, so they could never tell anyone what they'd done.

"And they just left the front door open?" Hamilton says skeptically.

Dani looks at him. "Major Hamilton, they _want_ to leave the front door open. They _want_ somebody to come in here and look at all the pretty jars and open one. They're _Goa'uld_."

They walk into the main chamber, keeping each other carefully in sight. There's an empty platform directly under the skylight, where Ereshkigal's jar probably sat, but like everything else here, the platform's plain and stark. Ereshkigal had a consort, Nergal, god of war, cognate with Mars. He's the lord of plagues. Nergal was originally a god of the Bright Pantheon until he descended into the underworld to bring banquet offerings to Ereshkigal. He disregarded the warnings of Ata, father of the gods, allowed Ereshkigal to seduce him, and was unable to ever leave the Underworld again. She doesn't see a jar for Nergal here -- no second dais, no companion jar, as there was for Isis and Osiris. They've never encountered a _Goa'uld_ calling itself Nergal. It's information, but she doesn't know what it means. They never knew all the _Goa'uld_ , and the _Tok'ra_ never shared all the information their treaty bound them to reveal. Nergal may have died thousands of years ago. He may never have existed at all.

She shines her light into the corners. The room is actually U-shaped, the two arms paralleling the hallway. Those spaces are dark without the skylight to illuminate them, and there are only a few jars there, scattered about as if in an afterthought. She continues her assessment. Some of the jars are broken, some are long-empty. Some look as if their stasis mechanisms have failed; they're in one piece, but they're discolored. Some are whole, and look just fine, and probably contain living symbiotes. She photographs and films everything she can.

John suggested the _Goa'uld_ in these jars had been kidnapped, but Dani doesn't think so. Rescued, she thinks. Anubis was waging war against all the other _Goa'uld_ for at least two years they knew of, and undoubtedly more. Smart _Goa'uld_ \-- and they weren't stupid, just vain, arrogant, and sadistic -- undoubtedly knew Anubis was going to win. They were looking for places to ride out the political shift. And the safest place wasn't a host -- the smartest ones knew that -- but a jar, and that's where they went, along with as many of their lesser brethren as they could coerce into joining them, and larvae as well. But then Anubis hadn't won, he'd lost. And so (she theorizes) their loyal human servants had panicked, grabbed as many of their masters as they could, and dumped them here, knowing that all the places that had been properly prepared for them were going to become ... unsuitable.

John and Hamilton help her document the site; the Colonel and Hicks stand guard in case something happens. McCluskey checks in with General Carter once; she has to go outside to do it, but she takes Hamilton with her. Dani can already start to see how things sorted out on SG-35 before she joined. McCluskey and Hamilton, Hicks and Nielsen. Adding her changes things. She hopes it works out. The chemistry of a team is volatile and delicate. When it doesn't work, the results can be both ugly and messy. No one ever proved there were murders back in General Hammond's day, but then, she's pretty sure no one ever investigated too closely. From the things Jack didn't (quite) say (later), the 'gentlemanly' thing to do was group suicide. Not that hard to arrange. Mortality rate among the Teams was always high. She wonders if that's one of the things John remembers.

She turns her mind back to the present. There's nothing in here but inert stone walls and canopic jars. All of the jars have _Goa'uld_ inscriptions, but less than fifteen percent of the inscriptions include proper names, and of those, less than ten percent are names she recognizes from Earth mythology. The rest? Alien pantheons? _Goa'uld_ names? She has no idea. Teal'c once said humans were only one of the races the _Goa'uld_ took as hosts -- the main one, true, because of all that Ancient technology their _Tau'ri_ bodies interface with so nicely, but not the only one. The _Goa'uld_ have been looting the Galaxy for the last 25,000 years -- they are (or were) undoubtedly walking around out there in bodies that would give humans nightmares. The SGC's never explored or even discovered the barest fraction of the _Goa'uld_ Empire. They just destroyed it, as irresistibly as a drop of poison under the tongue.

At the end of four hours Colonel McCluskey calls a for a rest-break. They go out onto the steps to eat MREs.

"Dr. Jackson?"

Time to earn her paycheck. "I have no idea where Ereshkigal is, Colonel. About a hundred and fifty of those other jars were carefully opened at some point. None of them were 'named' jars, so I'm guessing they contained _prim'ta_. We could take one of the remaining sealed ones back to the SGC to check. Or we could zat one, take a quick peek, and zat it again."

"Noted," McCluskey says dryly.

"I'm pretty sure the opened jars contained juveniles because the Ereshkigal jar was still here when the Hansard arrived, and I think that if the contents of any of the other jars had been mature enough to take over a host, I think the new _Goa'uld_ would have done something with her, and it would probably have involved taking her away in her jar -- in order to restrain her -- since, as you know, _Goa'uld_ don't play well together. There remain about seventy 'juvenile' jars in good condition, about a hundred 'named' jars in good condition -- of which I recognize thirteen names from the Akkadian and Sumerian pantheons -- approximately two hundred discolored and probably non-viable jars, and a lot of broken ones."

"That's a lot of snakes," Hicks drawls.

"About thirteen years ago we noted that _Goa'uld_ numbers were decreasing but we weren't sure why. After I attended a System Lords conclave we developed a theory it was because of ritual cannibalism on their part, but now I wonder if it might not have been because they were already going into hiding," Dani says.

"Would have been nice if the _Tok'ra'd_ bought a clue," John says.

She doesn't want to say what she's thinking: that they _must_ have known. "It's hard to see how anyone could miss it," she says instead. "We're talking about at least five hundred _Goa'uld_ and a _Goa'uld_ Queen, a hugely important one, very powerful, dropping out of circulation here. Even if this is the only cache that survived, it can't have been the only cache."

"And, ah, does anybody but me wonder where those baby _Goa'uld_ in the jars are now?" Hicks asks. His accent mangles the proper noun into near-unintelligibility. _Gauw-ah-ahawld._

John throws his hands up. Dani drops her face into her hands and groans. "We'll talk about that later," the Colonel says briskly. "How long until you're finished in there, Dr. Jackson?"

"I want to look at the walls with filters, and sound the walls and floors," she says. "Somebody brought those jars here, and I don't think they left. If I can find the necropolis, I may be able to find more information about who brought the jars here and when."

"You're the Doctor," McCluskey says. "But I'm not walking back to the Stargate in the dark."

They glance at the sky. It's overcast. Hard to tell when sunset is. "Tell me when you want me to go," she says reluctantly.

"We're not just leaving this here intact, are we?" John asks.

McCluskey shakes her head. "No. While Dr. Jackson's banging on the walls, you and Hicks will be preparing to reduce this whole place to a pile of very small rocks. I want to be sure absolutely nothing survives. Do I make myself completely clear?"

"Perfectly," John says, grinning wolfishly.

She'd like to object. A few hours more -- at most -- will barely be enough time to do a preliminary assessment of the site they're talking about destroying. But it's filled with _Goa'uld_. She doesn't object.

She brings her quarterstaff inside with her this time. The others, at John's direction, cautiously gather the jars together in the center of the room and then start placing charges along the walls. She first scans the walls -- IR, UV -- then sounds them. There are no secret marks, and the walls aren't hollow. The floor is of a uniform thickness. She sighs, defeated. There may be something under this building, but they aren't going to find a secret door leading to it. And it would have to be a door. There are no rings, no technology at all in this structure. It takes her two hours to go over the temple thoroughly, and by the end of that time McCluskey's pacing like a caged panther, with Hamilton dogging her heels patiently.

"Are you finished yet, Dr. Jackson?"

She turns around. "Colonel, I could spend the next month here and not be sure I've gotten everything. But yeah, sure, what the hell, let's blow it up. That's what we always do, right? I might get something out of the film."

"Fine. Let's go." A woman of few words.

John sets up one transmitter at one end of the hallway and one at the other. He can send a radio signal to them and set off all the charges at once from a safe distance. Considering how much punch he and Hicks have packed into the temple, a safe distance is probably all the way back to the Stargate, but he says the signal will stretch that far.

They're approaching the Stargate when it starts to engage. They aren't due for a check-in from the SGC. There's no cover anywhere.

"Dr. Nielsen, get ready to blow the temple the moment we see who's come to the raree show. Dr. Jackson, start dialing the moment you can get a clear shot. Hicks, Hamilton, cover them."

All of them nod. They stand back, doing their best to look _inconspicuous_ as the Stargate engages. Eight Jaffa step out through the Event Horizon. They're not wearing armor -- the Jaffa aren't anybody's guards these days. Two of them are carrying a big fishtank-on-carrying-poles contraption between them. It's filled with liquid and it looks heavy. All of them are armed.

The Event Horizon vanishes. So does the temple: John sends the signal and the explosion jars everything: not a rumble, not a trembling, just a single flat shock-and-flash. It's as abrupt as a dropped book -- so violent and without reverberation that it stuns, even at this distance. The Jaffa drop their tank. It shatters on the steps. They scatter, looking for the enemy. Most of them have had their god-marks overmarked with the solid circle of the Free Jaffa Nation; Dani doesn't recognize the remaining marks. She gets to the DHD and dials.

"Drop your weapons! We mean you no harm!" McCluskey shouts.

Five... Six... Seven... Wormhole. She sends her IDC. Green means go. She hears gunfire behind her and turns. One of the Jaffa raises his weapon, and Hicks fires. She pulls her zat and starts heading up the steps. The Jaffa are firing back; either they recognize the uniform or they know what the explosion meant.

"Go-go-go!" McCluskey shouts, but Dani hesitates at the edge of the event horizon. Hicks is the farthest away; McCluskey's just coming up the steps, firing behind her -- a heavy ugly stutter of an unfamiliar weapon -- and Hamilton and John are about even, but coming toward the Gate from different angles. They've taken down two of the Jaffa now, but the other six are still up, even with several rounds in them, and that means it's probably not tretonin keeping them alive. McCluskey reaches her, and her expression doesn't even change, she just reaches out and knocks Dani through the event horizon, stiff-arming her so Dani lands flat on her ass on the Gate Room Ramp. Less than thirty seconds later, the other four are through.

"Close it!" the Colonel calls, and the iris zips shut behind them. John reaches a hand down to her. Dani grabs his wrist, pulls herself to her feet.

"When I tell you to go, Dr. Jackson, go," McCluskey tells her, as unemotionally as if she's remarking on the weather.

She would have argued with Jack, if only for form's sake. Keeping her hand in. Now -- a lifetime later -- she just nods.

"Problem?" Sammy asks.

"We met some Jaffa as we were leaving, ma'am," Colonel McCluskey says. "The site's been destroyed."

"Debriefing in one hour," Sammy says.

Medical, shower and change, debriefing. It's pretty clear that a group of Jaffa -- affiliation unknown -- were raiding 878 for _prim'ta_ , avoiding the jars containing mature _Goa'uld_ and probably returning to the site repeatedly over a period of time. Since that's the case, they're probably not associated with Ereshkigal, if she's out there and alive. Ereshkigal would have cleared the site completely, not removed a few immature _Goa'uld_ at a time.

Tomorrow (Sammy tells them) they go talk to the _Tok'ra_.

But before she goes home, Dani has other things to do. Her first day back on the job as a member of a Gate Team and head of AA&T both, and she's already into overtime, but the tapes she shot on 878 have to be loaded into the mainframe and enhanced. She should do at least a preliminary assessment of them. She needs to see who in the Department is most current on the _Goa'uld_ \-- besides her -- and bring them up to speed; they haven't needed a full-time specialist in that area in a while. Maybe Winchester, if there isn't anyone else. His background in Linear A will actually come in handy there.

"You should eat, you know."

John steps behind her and starts to rub her shoulders. She sighs as he touches her. The muscles are tense. A very long day, most of it spent crouched on a hard stone floor, and the last couple of hours spent hunched over a computer screen. She aches.

"It's almost 1900. We've been here since 0530. We're seeing the _Tok'ra_ tomorrow. Come on down to the Commissary, and then let's go home."

For a moment she almost forgets the two of them are in the middle of a fight (but they are.) She's grateful he's professional enough not to bring it up here -- not that she'd ever doubted it -- but she's got a headache (another headache) and she knows they're going to have to ... talk. She's dreading it. She hesitates. Once she would have bargained. _Just a little more time (Jack)? I really need to finish this. I really need to avoid the conversation we're going to have (John)._ She _still_ really needs to finish this. But it's almost 1900, and she _also_ really needs to get up in the morning and talk to the _Tok'ra_. She's pretty sure Major Hamilton's never dealt with them, so she'll need to be on her game. She sighs, closes her files, logs out of her account.

"Yeah, okay."

He pats her on the shoulder and steps back. She gets up, follows him out of her office and up to the Commissary.

#

"So," he says. "Christmas pretty much sucked."

They're driving home. Taking one car. His. Little point to taking both, when they live in practically the same place and will both be back here in a lot less than twelve hours. She knows she's been maneuvered just a bit -- it's snowing; he said she was too tired to drive -- but is willing to let him have his way. Guilt.

"You didn't like your presents?" she asks. Jack had been a _Simpsons_ fan. The series went off the air years ago, of course. (Finally.) He'd collected the action figures; Jack always had a strange obsession with toys. She'd saved them, and now has given them to John, slipping the wrapped packages onto his desk this morning when he wasn't there. Along with a runner's pulse/cardio/distance calculator, bought _for_ John. Something old, something new.

"They were great." A beat. "Why not, Indy?" They're talking about her presents now. The one, specifically, that she didn't like.

"I--" she can't put into words what there are no words for. "I'll be moving in a few weeks. I'd sort of ... hoped ... you'd ... move with me."

#

She wants him to move in with her but she won't marry him? This is ... okay, heading into Freedman territory. And they aren't going there. Not just yet. Maybe (he'd pray if he believed in a God who listened) ever.

It's been an odd settling-in period. In one way, this is all new for both of them. He knows he does things she doesn't expect. He knew her better than anyone on Earth, but not in the ways he's getting to know her now. In another way, they're taking up where they left off -- but then the question arises: just _who_ are they (each of them) taking up with? She isn't the same woman he last saw twelve years ago. He loved that one. He loves this one, but he's having to get to know her.

He's certain, now, that 'John Nielsen' is a lot of the attraction on her side of things, and he's not sure how to feel about that. Because _he's_ John Nielsen, but it still -- almost -- feels as if she's stepping out on him -- Jack O'Neill -- by wanting him, and that's just wacky. It's quantum cake, he supposes, as in having it and eating it too (and he knows being able to make a joke like that makes him more New Guy than Old Guy): Jack without the last ten years (maybe even twelve years), and whatever happened to the two of them then. Her way of turning back time. (One of the safer ones, all things considered.) In which case, why not start it _all_ over and do it right? There's a big difference between living together and being married, and he wants her to take that last step. To be _willing_ to take that last step. He's known a lot of people -- old life, new life -- who just hung on being ... roommates ... for years, not seeing the difference, and he isn't willing to settle. On the other hand, say 'no', issue terms, and she won't cave. She'll balk. They don't need that on any front just now.

Damn Jaffa. Damn _Tok'ra_. Damn _snakes._

And every time she mentions Ereshkigal she gets this wild-eyed look. Well, Hathor isn't one of his favorite memories, either, and apparently Ereshkigal's her sister. Something there Indy isn't talking about. Something _else_ there Indy isn't talking about. And he resents that, down deep inside, in a place he can't touch and can't argue with. The way she shuts him out and refuses to talk. As if she's lying to him.

"I'll think about it," he says.

#

It's as much as she could hope for. The man's not a doormat. Jack wasn't. John isn't. She and John are all wrong for each other, she knew it going in. They don't need to just see other people. They both need to see a shrink. She rushed into this way too fast -- as if they were two other people -- and neither of them is. He isn't Jack. And she isn't Indiana.

She knows he wants her to be who she was the last time he saw her. Yes, _he_ ... the boy who looked over his shoulder at her as Jack led him out of the SGC for the last time. She hadn't thought anything of it at the time. She was relieved the whole tangled mess was over, glad things were settled, already moving on to the next crisis, and glad to have Jack -- the _real_ Jack -- back alive and safe. That was all. She'd never thought about what _John's_ life would be like, and the more she knows him now, the guiltier she feels for that selfishness. Too focused on herself to see the problems around her; it's always been her greatest flaw. Jack could never see that. And John still thinks of her as being who she was then. Before the final battle with Anubis, before the year Jack spent as commander of the SGC, before her marriage, before ten years in Washington ... and she isn't. She'd like to be, but she's learned she's capable of too many things. Coming back, seeing him, seeing the woman she'd been in the way he looked at her, it was too easy to believe being with him was a road back to that. It isn't. Today's proven it to her (she stifles a sigh). Too many aches and pains. Not enough hours in the day. SG-35 isn't SG-1, and she knew it wouldn't be, but there's such a chasm between knowing and _knowing_.

She shifts in the passenger seat, trying to ease the sudden cramp in her back, thinking longingly of a hot shower before bed and knowing she's probably too tired to take the time. Tradeoffs. Maybe a drink. She'll have three months to work it off before the Team Review. Scotch and ibuprofen; she wonders, now, how often Jack went to bed on that. He bitched constantly about his knees, his back. Half the time they thought he was joking, putting it on the way he complained about _trees_ , for god's sake. It might have been an act, but she wonders now if it was actually a joke. He was a couple of years younger than she is now when he first led SG-1, but the years leading up to it were harder. Of course, he'd trained for it all his life. But it's not just the aches and pains that tell her she's someone else. They're what ibuprofen was invented for, after all. It's...

What SG-1 had was special. Unique. From the moment they were decommissioned -- before, from the moment Jack stepped up and left them -- she's known better than to think she'd ever find it anywhere again. But being in the field with SG-35 makes her miss it the way she's told amputees miss a missing limb. Phantom pain. Expecting something to be there that isn't. She'll never be what she was (again), because what she was wasn't _her_. It was all of them, together. And they aren't here. Jack's dead, and Teal'c's gone, and Sammy's become someone else. And who she is now -- without them -- doesn't seem to be quite enough. Whoever she is, it certainly isn't the woman John thinks -- or thought -- he wanted to give that ring to. Not Jack's girl Indiana. So it's better for both of them she didn't accept it, for whatever reason. (He'll figure that out eventually.) And it's probably better for both of them if he refuses her other offer as well, though that will hurt, and she'll miss him, but then, she's always been greedy as well as self-centered. But John has always -- then and probably now -- been wise, while she's been merely clever. She trusts him to do the right thing. She always has.

#

"Oh, god," she gasps, sitting bolt upright in the passenger seat. "I screwed up."

They're just pulling into the complex; she's been silent for the last twenty minutes. He'd been sure she was asleep; she looks exhausted. "What?"

"The storehouse was built on a _tumulus_ , and I was sure we'd find a passage to an underground chamber. But I didn't find any evidence of an entrance when I sounded the floor. Only I didn't check the floor of the hall. That's where it has to have been!"

Her voice is rising in agitation now, and he's damned glad she's belted in, because she looks like she's about to climb out of the Jeep and go running back to the Mountain. "Indy, you don't even know there _was_ a hidden chamber," he says.

"I should have checked."

Okay, here they go. It's post-mission flagellation time, where she decides she should have figured out stuff it would have taken a combination of God and a time machine to unravel. "McCluskey wanted to leave. It was getting dark."

"I should have made her stay," she insists.

"If we'd left any later we would have run into those Jaffa in an even worse place. Or been bottled up in the temple." It's time for a reality check, but that's always been his job.

"We could have taken them. Then we could have checked their pouches for symbiotes."

"Since when do you talk so casually about killing eight Jaffa?" he asks, and he can't quite manage to keep the incredulity out of his voice.

"Since they spent the last ten years jerking Earth around about the sovereignty of the Jaffa Free Nation, demanding we back them against the _Tok'ra_ so they could develop their own tretonin production, and now have decided to go back to _snakes_ ," she snaps, and her voice contains an undercurrent of frustration and rage it didn't have at the debriefing.

He pulls up in front of his door. "So Teal'c's the enemy now?" he asks quietly.

"Not Teal'c. But you--" she stops.

_You know what politics is like,_ she'd been going to say. Does she think he _doesn't_ know? Does she think you get to be a Colonel in the United States Air Force without playing politics? And being played by them? Probably.

He gets out of the car. She's standing by the passenger side, face turned up into the snow. On the verge of hiking back across the complex to her own place. He checks his watch. About eight hours until they have to head back to the Mountain. He sees her lips move silently, and knows what she's saying. _I screwed up._ "Come inside," he says, taking her arm.

"It's over now," he says, once he's got her inside. "McCluskey's call. You told her there was more to find. And the whole place is gone now anyway. Nothing left but a really big hole in the ground."

"And there goes our only hope of finding out where the contents of that jar went -- since we know it _walked_ out of there. We just sit on our tails and wait. Until the day she." The last sentence stops abruptly in the middle. It sounds as if it's complete but it isn't. It's the way Indy talked about Hathor for years afterward, when she had to talk about her at all.

"Well, when she _does_ show up, we'll find a vat of liquid hydrogen to drop her into. Or just, you know, blow up her spaceship. That always works," he says. This is one of Indy's dangerous moods -- in the sense of wildly unpredictable -- and he's not quite sure how they got here. He's pretty sure -- at least he hopes -- she's too tired to keep it up for long. They need her in the morning.

" _Usually_ works." She hesitates in the hallway, but he's closing the door and locking it up for the night. He might have let her go on back to her own condo before, but not now. For a moment he thinks he's in for a fight -- a secondary fight; she isn't about to let go of the main issue -- but she just pulls off her coat and hangs it on a peg to dry then bends over, wincing, and drags off her boots. Props her glasses up on top of her head; they've fogged. "I shouldn't have forgotten to check the corridor," she repeats stubbornly.

"Beer?" She shakes her head, walking toward the living room. When he's sure she isn't going to try to bolt -- he doesn't put anything past her in this mood, and she can be surprisingly childish -- he goes into the kitchen, grabs a beer, fixes a Scotch for her. Too keyed-up and she needs to wind down; she never did have anything other than two speeds: fast-forward and the next thing to unconscious. Never a fan of moderation.

"You wouldn't have gotten a chance to check out whatever was down there before we got overrun, you know. If there was anything. And we'd've had to blow the place and run anyway," he adds when he comes out. She's sitting on the couch. Maybe the worst is over.

"Shouldn't have bothered trying to give up coffee," she says, accepting the Scotch with a rueful smile. "With this going on, I'll have every excuse for any blood pressure readings Erin gets. Oh, and we'll have to ask Sammy to send someone to the library at Dakara. I wonder which _Goa'uld_ those Jaffa belonged to back in the old days?"

She hasn't really left work -- not in her mind -- but at least she isn't hunched over a computer a mile underground. It always used to drive him (O'Neill) crazy; there'd never been a moment when she wasn't thinking about some kind of puzzle to do with her job. Now, oddly, he finds more often than not his mind operates the same way. But with objects, not people. Putting together and taking apart. Lately he's been preoccupied with the way the _Goa'uld_ do things. They have two kinds of technology. One can only be used by someone whose blood contains _naquaadah_ : he's been trying to build an interface so humans can use it. The other's designed for the Jaffa: dumbed-down _Goa'uld_ 'magic'. The fixes aren't elegant or simple -- one of the reasons their technology has baffled the SGC engineers for years -- layer after layer of patches and juryrigs put in place by _Goa'uld_ technicians who either didn't understand what they were doing or didn't care. And when they get the stuff to Earth, they've just been adding one more layer of workarounds, instead of trying to strip all the layers away to get back to first principles. If he does that -- if he _can_ do that -- he could actually make all their alien toys work properly for the first time. But there are never enough hours in the day.

"Maybe you can find out. Talk to their First Prime, if he's still alive."

"After we talk to the _Tok'ra_."

"Yeah, that's gonna be fun."

She smiles, wearily, and he decides the storm has blown over. Short and sharp, by the standards of the old days. "Look, why don't you go to bed? I'll be along," he says.

"Yeah. Good night's sleep, then explain to the _Tok'ra_ Council that we haven't defeated the _Goa'uld_ after all." She's willing to go along with it, though. Tired, and doesn't want to talk. Mature wisdom, as the man said, often resembles being too tired. She tosses back the last of her Scotch, kisses him -- hesitantly, apologetically -- on the corner of the mouth, and goes off to the bedroom.

#

It's the same dream, one she has frequently now. She's ... somewhere. She doesn't know where. But she's lost and alone and she doesn't want to be here. She wants to go home. She's facing the Stargate. It's engaged. Instead of the Event Horizon, though, she can see right through it, as if it were an open door. Jack and Sammy and Mr. T and General Hammond are standing on the other side. Behind them are other people -- she always knows -- but she can't quite make them out. She knows they're there, though. Watching. She takes a step forward. Why have they left her here?

_"No."_ Sometimes it's General Hammond who says it. _"No, Dr. Jackson."_ Sometimes it's Jack who says it. _"No, Indiana."_ The rest is always the same. _"You're staying there."_ And the entire Stargate vanishes and she's trapped.

#

When he comes to bed, she's crying in her sleep again. He can hear it in her breathing, though she's quiet. He'd like to wake her up, but it's always been a good way to get hit. The Other Guy trained her himself. Him, Carter, Teal'c. _Don't assess, react. Sort it out later._ She didn't have size on her side, she wasn't ever going to intimidate an attacker. If she was going to take out anybody, she needed the element of surprise. So he gets into bed making as much noise as plausible, bouncing the mattress and lifting up the covers to let in all the cold air. And she rolls over, grumbling irritably -- not awake, but not dreaming now -- and calls him Daniel. A blurry sentence in a language he doesn't speak, but the name at the end is clear. _Dan'yel_. It stops him for a moment, then he shrugs minutely, rolls in, and pulls the covers up. She moves toward him automatically and he puts an arm around her, and settles in. And yeah, they're in the middle of a fight, but they're also in the middle of a war, and he loves her too much to hurt her even while they're fighting. Still. _That_ was unexpected. Or ... not? She's still got the guy's pictures. She's moved them out of her bedroom and into her office now, but she hasn't put them away. Why should she?

Would it be worse or better if she called him 'Jack?' She never has. Not since that one time in his lab, back at the beginning.

Never in bed.

#

December 28th, and SG-35 will be met in the Gate Room by the _Tok'ra_ who's going to escort them to the latest _Tok'ra_ homeworld. As usual, they've only been told the name of the symbiote -- Lemrek -- and that 'he' identifies as male. Though _Tok'ra_ have no gender, they're influenced by the gender of their hosts. Lemrek's had nothing but male hosts for his entire lifespan, and that's a long time. Lemrek has been alive since the time of Ra.

_Goa'uld_ \-- and _Tok'ra_ are _Goa'uld_ ; same species, different ideology -- have a natural lifespan of thousands of years. The _Goa'uld_ used the sarcophagi to prolong the lives of their hosts -- and themselves, of course -- and to heal injuries -- but their primary use of it was for recreation. Recreational or not, the fact the _Goa'uld_ used the sarcophagus meant (or means) that they're nearly immortal. It's true the _Goa'uld_ who called itself the Jade Emperor Yu died of old age, but Yu was at least ten thousand years old, and might have been older. The _Tok'ra_ \-- who refuse to use the sarcophagus for any purpose at all -- are aging and dying. If they continue to refuse to use it, in a century -- at most -- they'll all be gone. There are very few of them left even now. All the ones there ever were or ever could be came from one spawning of one Queen: Egeria. And she's dead.

When they get to the Gate Room, Lemrek's standing there. Dani hears John take a deep breath. Despite what Sammy said, Lemrek's current host is female. "Shallan," John says quietly.

It's something Dani won't easily forget. Shallan was the _lo'tar_ Jack/Kanan went to Ba'al's fortress to rescue. She'd chosen to stay with the _Tok'ra_ afterward. Of course she'd Blend.

"Colonel McCluskey, why don't you introduce your team? I don't think Lemrek's met any of them before," Sammy says.

#

Their meeting with the _Tok'ra_ High Council is a less-than-spectacular success. The _Tok'ra_ share information about as well as they ever did. Jacob/Selmak is dead, and there are a number of new faces here, Blendings Dani's never dealt with. Though the _Tau'ri_ / _Tok'ra_ Treaty is technically still in force, in practice it's in abeyance; strained to the breaking-point by Earth's insistence the _Tok'ra_ hand over the means to manufacture tretonin to the Jaffa. She and Pierce brief the Council on everything they've found out about the -- possible -- existence of a new _Goa'uld_ Queen, about the 'warehouse' on PR9-878, about the fact that -- they think -- Jaffa were looting it for _prim'ta_.

"And you do not know whom these Jaffa served?" High Counselor Per'sus asks.

"Well, technically, High Counselor, the Jaffa no longer _serve_ anyone," Hamilton says. "We weren't able to determine any former affiliation, certainly."

Major Hamilton is a boundless well of patience. They've decided he should handle most of the report to the High Council. After all, it's a question of ethics. And he's military. The _Tok'ra_ have always responded just a little better to the military face of the SGC. Martouf adored Sammy, because of Jolinar. Martouf/Lantash is dead. Selmak always had a soft spot for them, because of Jacob Carter. Jacob/Selmak is dead.

"And you do not know whether they themselves were carrying _Goa'uld_?"

"As we've said, we were in a hurry to get out of there," McCluskey says.

"Can you tell us if you've noticed any signs of increased activity that you think might be related to the _Goa'uld_?" Dani asks. She's the 'bad cop' today. They worked all this out in the briefing before they left.

"If we had, surely we would have shared such intelligence with you, Dr. Jackson, as required under the terms of our treaty," Counselor Per'sus says.

"It's important we continue to work together," she says. "We--"

"As we have in the past?" Per'sus interrupts. " _Tau'ri_ interference has cost the _Tok'ra_ countless irreplaceable lives in the past twenty years. Whenever we have placed our trust in you, we have been betrayed."

"Not by us," she says.

"Jacob Carter influenced Selmak to a course of action that was ultimately unwise. He stole _Tok'ra_ technology and placed it at your disposal."

"Stuff you were supposed to give us in the first place!" John snaps. McCluskey shakes her head at him ever-so-slightly. _Shut up._

"That is a matter of interpretation. The destruction of Dakara was ... premature," Per'sus says.

Dani stares at John for a disbelieving moment -- they were both there, and know it wasn't -- then back at Per'sus. "If Anubis had set off that machine, Counselor, none of us would be having this conversation," she says.

"He would certainly not have been in a position to do so had you not consistently disregarded our advice and warnings, Dr. Jackson."

"I'm very sorry we all seem to have this history of difficulties and misunderstandings between our two races, Counselor, and I'm sure it's something nobody wants to see, but as a very wise man once said, one can't change the past, only learn from it," Hamilton says conciliatingingly. "We _are_ facing a new problem now, one that affects _Tok'ra_ and _Tau'ri_ alike. We've brought you this information in good faith, not only because our treaty obligates us to, but as a gesture between ... friends."

Dani doesn't quite wince. That's the wrong approach to take with the _Tok'ra_. She'd gotten along with them in the old days -- they'd fascinated her -- but they were nobody's friends. Just as arrogant as the _Goa'uld_ in some ways. Certainly as ruthless. Per'sus smiles, as if Major Hamilton has just stepped into a trap.

"Then as ... friends ... you will understand we act in your best interests when we advise you to go home, Major Hamilton. You will certainly be advised if there's anything that requires your attention."

Hamilton looks thoughtful. John looks like he's about to start yelling. McCluskey looks grim. Hicks is just staring at the walls -- not paying much attention to the conversation, but a lot of attention to the position of everyone in the room. And her? Dani knows the _Tok'ra_ are lying, and that means their problems have just increased exponentially.

"Lemrek will conduct you back to the transport rings," Per'sus adds. Their audience with the High Council is over.

All of them are silent on the way back to the rings. Not much to say, and they certainly don't want to say it in front of the _Tok'ra_. At least they've only wasted half a day. And that not completely, because now they know the _Tok'ra_ are screwing them over.

When the rings are in sight, Shallan/Lemrek seems hesitant. Lemrek has been dominant so far, but it's Shallan who speaks now.

"I must speak with you. With the one you call John Nielsen. Alone."

Oh, hang a banner over him, why doesn't she? "I'll go with him, Colonel," Dani says quickly. "I've dealt with the _Tok'ra_ before."

"Fine." One thing about Colonel McCluskey. She isn't slow about making up her mind. "Take your time," she adds ironically. And she sends her two civilians off alone with a _Tok'ra_ of dubious intentions.

They zip into a side-room decorated in Early Intergalactic Crystal. Shallan touches a button on a wrist-ornament and Dani sees a force-field shimmer into place over the doorway. "Now we cannot be heard. It's good to see you again, Colonel Jack O'Neill. I never thanked you properly for rescuing me from Ba'al's fortress."

"Yeah, Shallan, about all that--"

Her head dips and her eyelids flutter; she's listening to Lemrek. "You are a clone?" she asks, when her gaze steadies again.

"Yeah," he says, letting out a long breath.

Dani wonders how much the _Tok'ra_ have guessed. Or if they _know_. Or if they have spies -- in the SGC, in the NID. (Jack always wondered.) Or if they can just tell by looking whether somebody's a clone or not. It's possible.

"I hope you are as honorable as Colonel O'Neill, then," Shallan says. "Lemrek's mate is on the Council. What she has said disturbs him. As you know, we are ... dying. That the numbers of the _Goa'uld_ ... increase ... has not been unknown to us for some time. Many believe our only hope is to resort to the sarcophagus. We cannot increase our numbers, or replace our dead, but we can extend the lives of those who are left."

"Surely you, of all the races in the Galaxy, know the cost of using a sarcophagus?" Dani asks quietly.

"We do," it's Lemrek who's speaking now. "But it is argued that one -- or even two -- exposures will not cause much change -- after all, you, Dr. Jackson -- and your donor, John Nielsen -- survived dozens of such exposures -- and it will extend our lives by centuries. We need that time."

"Do you guys _have_ a sarcophagus?" John asks.

"Not yet. But they are not so very difficult to acquire." It's Shallan again. "The Jaffa have them, and are eager to trade for what the _Tok'ra_ have to offer."

Wait. The _Jaffa_ have sarcophagi? This is bad. "Shallan, do you or Lemrek know anything about Ereshkigal?" Dani asks urgently.

Shallan shakes her head slightly, frowning. "We are not certain. All Lemrek knows is that now the Jaffa speak of a Garden of the Gods as they once spoke of Kheb. We first heard rumors of such a place a year or two ago. We do not know what it means."

Dani does.

"Thank you, Shallan. We appreciate you having this little chat with us," John says.

"And we'll try not to abuse your trust in us," Dani adds. She sees John make a face. Any trust that's been abused, he plainly thinks, is on the _Tok'ra_ side.

"We must go," Shallan says.

They return to the others. When the five of them ring to the surface, the Stargate's in the distance. Whatever planet they're on is a cold, rocky, inhospitable desert -- which hardly matters to the _Tok'ra_ in their tunnels.

"Have a nice chat?" McCluskey asks. They form up and start walking.

"Peachy," John says. "The _Tok'ra_ are planning to go over to sarcophaguses -- which is going to make them _just_ like the snakes in the long run -- the Jaffa Free Nation's going to sell them to them -- the _Tok'ra_ know the _Goa'uld_ are breeding like rabbits and somehow forgot to tell us -- and oh, yeah, there's something out there called 'The Garden of the Gods,' that's apparently a really hot topic for everybody but us."

"Only one I know of is that park on Pike's Peak," McCluskey says. "Nice place."

"So was the other one," Dani says. "It's from Sumerian mythology. It's the original of the Garden of Eden."

"So how come she, ah, he? -- told you all this?" Hamilton wants to know.

"Said I reminded it of an old boyfriend," John says lightly.

#

She's standing under the hot water in the shower stall in the SGC, letting it beat down on her shoulders and banging her forehead slowly and gently against the tiles. Ten years of grace, and they have it all to do over again. _Thank god Jack didn't live to see this,_ she thinks. Only he did.

"Dr. Jackson. _Danielle_." There's a hand on her shoulder. She comes to herself with a start and realizes what she's doing. She looks up. Colonel McCluskey's looking at her. Concerned. Wrapped in a robe, towel around her neck. At least Jack could never ... hover ... in the Women's Shower Room.

"I'm okay." She steps out of the shower, reaches for her own robe.

"I know the news we got today wasn't the best."

She laughs just a little. "Colonel, any news we got never was."

After McCluskey changes and leaves she stands in front of the mirror with her blow dryer. Hair's getting messy; she should make up her mind what to do about it. Roots are showing, too; it's been almost a year since she's been anywhere near a beauty salon for her usual oh-so-careful tinting and highlighting. The strands of grey -- not too many yet -- show clearly. Nobody's mistaken John for her son when they're out in public together, but that day will come. Seventeen years is a variable gap. In five years or ten she'll be rat-grey. He'll be ... distinguished. Of course, the way they're heading, both personally and professionally, it may not matter. And she needs to see Sammy privately to tell her Shallan almost blew his cover in front of the rest of the team today. She sighs and turns to her locker. There's an official debriefing to get through first.

Sammy says they'll be the ones -- inevitably -- to catch the mission to Dakara, especially since she wants Dani to talk to Teal'c off the record. But these days, setting up a visit to Dakara takes time. It will be next week at least before they can go, so they should all have a few days to play catch-up. She goes down to her office, gets an outside line, checks her home phone. The Hitchcocks are out on schedule; Dani's lawyer has the keys to the house. The painters will be in on the fifth if disaster doesn't strike. They said they could be done in three days. On the tenth, new carpet goes down. On January 14th, she moves in, whether she's here or not. She's ordered curtains for the master bedroom; she just hopes they arrive in time. Any other windows can wait. She makes a note; she'll need to see about getting wood delivered for the fireplace. The Hitchcocks never used it, oddly enough.

Back to work.

#

__

_**

VIII. Paths of Glory

**_

__

"So what do you think of Dani?"

"She's a pistol. Begging your pardon, ma'am."

A General's work is never done. Meetings, briefings, paperwork, command decisions. And face-time. Breakfast, lunch, coffee, sometimes dinner, whatever she can manage, with Department Heads and Team Leaders. Supposedly casual and off-the-clock. Everyone knows it isn't. But it's a chance to speak a little more freely, and bring up things that don't come up any other time.

"Fitting in?"

"I think she will. Hasn't mentioned SG-1 once."

"Are you surprised, Colonel?"

"Frankly, General?"

"Frankly, Colonel."

"Then, yes. I'm surprised. Everyone knows she was Flagship. It's one of the reasons we wanted her, after all, I won't play coy. And it isn't that she pretends it never happened. Just about took our heads off in that _Goa'uld_ warehouse any time any of us stepped out of line. I'd just think she'd..."

"Compare you to us?"

"I'd never say that, ma'am."

Sam sighs inwardly. Marines. Colonels. A thousand ways to drive you crazy. "It's working out with her and Dr. Nielsen on the same team?"

McCluskey smiles. "No problems there, ma'am. Oh, and I'd like to get a waiver to allow Dr. Nielsen to carry military armament in the field. I've qualified him myself on the range with our current weaponry. I know he's a civilian, but we might be running into some rough stuff and I'd feel better with another shooter at my back."

"I don't see why that should be a problem."

She's the General, after all.

#

"So, Dani, how's the Department?"

"Fine. Can I have a Sumerian expert? I need somebody full time. Someone who speaks the language fluently."

"I'll see if it's in the budget; you see who's out there. I'll need at least five candidates to make sure we can clear one. And SG-35?"

"What about them?" Dani asks suspiciously, and Sam sighs inwardly. McCluskey didn't say there weren't problems, she said -- implied -- they'd go away. And Dani doesn't want to talk.

"You remember SG-35? Those guys you went out with last week? And are going out with next week?"

"The mission's a go?" Dani asks eagerly.

"It will be. And...?"

"Oh they're fine. We're good. We've only been out twice, you know. Takes a while to shake down. Hamilton did okay with the _Tok'ra_ ; it really wouldn't have mattered what he said. He worries too much. Colonel McCluskey let me and John go off with Shallan; that was good. And nobody got snaked back at the warehouse." Faint praise. Well, sometimes Dani takes a while to make up her mind.

"So. New Years Eve tomorrow. Any plans?"

Dani shrugs. "There's the usual bash down at Peterson. The Colonel said she'd get John and me in if we wanted to go, but I'm tired of New Year Eve parties. I'm going to go home and read a book. You?"

"I'll be ... bashing. Showing the flag, dancing with all the handsome young officers, drinking bad champagne punch and watching the ice sculptures melt."

"Have fun," Dani says neutrally.

#

On New Year's Eve, she goes home. Really home. 1410 Irvington Court.

She hasn't seen John all day. He's got as many projects circling the landing strip as she does these days. They haven't made any plans for New Year's Eve. (They still haven't talked.) She leaves the SGC at 1700 on the dot; a short day for her. Doesn't even stay to do her usual (alas, less than usual lately) workout. She'll go back to brutalizing herself in the New Year: 35's quarterly medical review is in six weeks. Less of a grace-period than she'd hoped for, but she's on their schedule now. She should be able to get through it. She drives back to the condo to load up a few things she picked up over the last few days.

If John had actually asked her out -- something she really can't imagine despite (because of) her experience of the Washington social round...

_(Jack was never a big fan of parties._

_She crushes the memory with ruthless efficiency.)_

...she's not sure what she would have told him. She's been planning to do this ever since she knew the house -- _her_ house -- would be empty tonight. She's made all the arrangements. She's taking her laptop with her so she can watch the ball drop in New York. (Call her a sentimentalist.) She bought a basket of provisions so she can picnic in the living room. She has candles, because the electricity's on, but there aren't any lamps. Some wood for the fireplace; you can buy anything at the supermarket. She drives by John's place on her way out of the complex, even though it isn't on her way out. When she gets there, she sees his windows are dark. Not home yet, or been here and gone. She hesitates, parks, and sits in the cooling car, still hesitating. They haven't seen a lot of each other in the last three days, since their return from the _Tok'ra_. She's slept in her bed. He's slept in his. They aren't precisely avoiding each other; it's more of a breathing space. He's thinking things over, she knows. When he's done, she's sure they'll talk. Will he tell her 'not now, later'? That was her line, this time, only she didn't even promise him a 'later', she just told him 'no.' She wonders, without curiosity, what he'll tell her. What she deserves to hear? Jack never did that, take it how you will.

She's had extra keys to the house made. They're still in her purse. After a long moment she gets out of the car and goes inside -- they still have each others' keys -- and drops off a set for the house, with a note. Nothing directive, just telling him where she is. He can do anything he likes with the information, including ignore it.

She doesn't know what she hopes for.

#

No one's been here in several days; the driveway and the walkway are both a pristine blanket of white and the SUV lugs its way into the drive in full four-wheel mode. She leaves the headlights on as she makes her way to the front door and opens it. She gets the lights on -- porch, hallway -- and by their illumination makes her way through the dark yet still-familiar house to the kitchen -- lights here -- and out to the garage, where she can open the garage door to drive the SUV inside. Once it's in, and the garage is locked up tight again, she moves back through the house with her spoils and plunder. The basket of food goes on the kitchen counter -- it looks stark without all the countertop appliances, but they've left the major ones, it was part of the deal -- the candles and the wood (two trips' worth) go out to the living room. She realizes she's forgotten her computer in the car and has to go back for it.

In the shadowy living room, she arranges the candles on hearth and mantle and lights them. They reflect in the curtainless living room windows, just the flames. Tiny dots of brightness. She's been in plenty of places where candles were the only nighttime light: it gives her a sense of familiarity. Next she builds the fire and -- after checking the damper -- lights it as well, carefully stacking the spare logs beside it. The fire slowly kindles. The chimney's drawing well; it was one of the things she had checked by professionals. Not that anything she found would have kept her from buying this house.

Once the fire's going properly she opens her computer and logs in (secure wireless satellite uplink) to the site she wants. The screen shows her a real-time image of Times Square, two hours East. It will be midnight there before it's here. There are places, in fact, where it's already tomorrow. She can celebrate the New Year for hours.

She leans back against the stones of the hearth and closes her eyes.

#

_"No, Dani. You're staying there."_

She gasps herself awake to the sound of a key in the front door. Scrubs at her eyes and coughs to clear her throat. The nightmare again, but something new has been added, only the dream-images are jumbled and fading and she can't quite grasp it. She stands up as John comes through the door. He's carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

"Got your note," he says. "Sorry I'm late. I thought we could still..."

She glances at her watch. Only a little after ten, but she's missed the ball-drop in New York.

"Come in," she says. She's still a little groggy from her abrupt awakening, and, well ... John's here with champagne.

"There's some more stuff in the car," he says.

"I'll open the garage again, then. There's room for you, too."

He brought wood as well; a practical man. More food. More champagne. A sleeping bag. He taught her himself -- long ago -- never to assume, but she can't help drawing conclusions.

"I figured you probably didn't have a bearskin rug," he says.

"As if you're ever going to see me naked on a bearskin rug."

"A man can dream."

They build up the fire again; there's more than enough wood now to keep it burning all night if they like. He opens the champagne. "It isn't midnight yet," she protests.

"It's midnight somewhere," he points out. They sip the champagne in silence, sitting on the hearth. Candlelight. Firelight. And while she knows they're probably going to still have to talk -- somewhere, sometime -- the larger questions, as always in their lives, have been asked and answered without words. He's letting her off the hook. He's going to stay on her terms.

"Dance with me?" he asks. She regards him quizzically. There's no music. "Aw, c'mon," he says, pointing at her computer. "I know this thing has a radio."

Nobody's called them 'radios' in years. She makes a face. But she gets up, finds a link to a clearcast channel with dance music. Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, in fact, in the spirit of the evening. Ancient history.

"There we go," he says, satisfied.

He gets to his feet and takes her in his arms. They dance, swaying to the antique music. She's a good dancer. She taught Teal'c how: jitterbug, mambo, waltz, foxtrot. Jack had been surprised she knew. She hadn't; she'd had to learn; but it was a small step from the folk-dances she _did_ know to ballroom dancing. She rests her cheek on John's shoulder, and can't help but think of the past. Jack was a reluctant dancer. He knew how, but hated to be on display. Rarely relaxed. Except for a very few occasions, cherished in her memory, he didn't seem to enjoy it much. John's different. There's just the two of them. There's no one on display. It's just them, on New Year's Eve, in a house that's grown unfamiliar through the passage of years. He holds her firmly, but not too tightly, and they dance. He dances just with her, and she lets the memories go.

#

She looked so surprised when he asked her to dance. He's never danced with her before. Neither -- that he remembers -- has The Other Guy. It wouldn't really have been ... safe. But he -- O'Neill -- must have danced with her in the years since (the ones she remembers and he doesn't, as if he's got a weird kind of amnesia.) Washington. Parties. Married couple. Allowed to do anything they wanted, perfectly openly.

She's afraid, he realizes. She was never afraid of the _Goa'uld_. Of what they could do, sure, anyone would be. But she stood up to the snakeheads toe-to-toe whenever they faced them. Replicators, space lizards, big honking giant aliens, the Aschen ... she had absolutely no sense of self-preservation. And no fear. Went charging right in, convinced intellect and good intentions would see them through and get them out the other side. She's lost that. And it isn't anything they might meet through the Stargate she's afraid of this time. It's _them_. Him and her. The future they could have. She won't talk about it. Or about those last ten years. She used to talk about almost everything, so long as it wasn't really personal. Odd, because she couldn't really keep a secret either -- at least about herself -- or lie when it would do her the most good. Compulsive confessor. The Other Guy let her keep one or two secrets, but only because he already knew them -- she really never had the least idea of how thorough or how continuous the security review of the personnel at the SGC was.

There was no reason for her to know. She never did anything to compromise the security of the Stargate Program.

He's going to cave; he knew it the moment he came home and saw those keys on his kitchen counter, because he knows it's her way of saying: _please_. And because that's as close as she'll ever come to asking, he's going to move in with her and play house, and maybe it's one of his less-brilliant ideas, or maybe, if he does, and she sees the sky doesn't fall in on them, she'll be willing to reconsider, because he isn't going to stop asking her for what he really wants, and what he wants is marriage. He never thought he would. Call him a traditionalist.

"I got you something," he says, when they're sitting again. She's cuddled up against him and they're finishing off the bottle. There's another in the kitchen, and they both have to report tomorrow, but only to their desks, and nobody's lives rest on the decisions he makes any more. "No boxes this time." He reaches into his jacket pocket. The diamond star glitters on its slender chain, twisting gently between his fingers. She smiles, and leans forward so he can clasp it around her neck.

"So when do you move?" he asks a while later.

"Fourteenth," she says. "Two weeks. Painters and new carpet first. I don't know if I'll even be ... _here_ ... but between Nyan and the Air Force, it'll get done."

"Two weeks," he says. "Not a lot of time. You think your buddy Nyan can take care of my place, too?"

"Oh, yes," she says. "Yes."

#

Her cellphone rings. "If that's the Mountain calling, tell them somebody else can save the world tonight," John says.

She squirms around in the sleeping bag, trying to free her arm. She left her phone within reach just because she thought someone might call, but she can't quite get her hand on it at this angle. There are a lot of things you can do in a sleeping bag, but hunt for the cellphone on the living room floor doesn't seem to be among them. "Dr. Jackson," she finally says.

"Dani! Happy New Year!" It's Sammy. She can hear the sounds of horns and noisemakers in the background. Sammy must still be at the party.

"Sammy! Happy New Year!" It must be midnight.

"I tried your home phone -- I knew you'd be up -- but then I figured you must have gone out after all. Where are you?"

"I-- _Yah!_ Stop that!" John's nuzzling the side of her neck and it tickles. A lot. "I'm over at the house."

"I seem to be interrupting something," Sammy says, actually sounding amused, and Dani feels herself blushing helplessly.

"No! I--"

John plucks the phone out of her hand. "Say goodnight, Carter. Happy New Year."

#

January 5th. The painters are at the house. They're on Dakara. They Gate through onto a plateau overlooking what was once Ba'al's temple complex. It's hot and dry. There's a red sky and a constant wind. Once Dakara was the crown jewel of Ba'al's domain. Before that, a place of importance to the Ancients, but since the Jaffa have never let anyone from Earth mount a scientific expedition to study the remains of the Ancient site here, they don't know much more than that.

It took them forever to get permission to come, because -- officially -- this is a very low-priority mission. Dr. Jackson has come (officially) to do some research in the Jaffa Archives on Jaffa god-marks for a paper she's writing on the _Goa'uld_ and -- incidentally -- to pay a call on an old friend, if possible. Since the _Goa'uld_ are -- of course -- a dead issue, there's no hurry. The rest of 35 is coming with her purely as a matter of protocol. No one's armed. (The Jaffa Council doesn't permit outsiders to carry weapons on Jaffa worlds anyway.) Colonel McCluskey, Major Hamilton, and Sergeant Hicks are all in their dress uniforms. She and John are in formal clothes. She's wearing the diamond star.

She'd spoken to Sammy privately about having John sit this one out. Teal'c will know who he is the moment he sets eyes on him, and while she trusts Mr. T not to _say_ \-- and she's sure he's as inscrutable as ever -- the near-miss with Shallan has her feeling twitchy. Sammy refused. She pointed out that if Dani wants to help maintain John's cover, singling him out for special treatment isn't the way to do it. They'll just have to muddle through.

They're met at the Dakara Gate by a reception committee. Teal'c isn't with them. McCluskey speaks first, thanking the Jaffa for allowing them to visit. She introduces them with their full formal names and titles. Dani speaks next, paraphrasing the Colonel's speech and adding her own thanks for being allowed to visit the Jaffa archives. She really hates standing out here in the wind and the dust, and the aridity's making her sinuses hurt. The head of the delegation reminds them Dakara is holy ground to the Jaffa, and they must conduct themselves with humility and respect at all times.

Finally they're shown to the Council Chambers. The Council's in session; they have to wait. Another show of petty politics; their arrival was timed to the second; the Council knew exactly when they'd be arriving. But the Jaffa Free Nation is young, and -- from all reports -- wildly insecure. They know they needed the _Tau'ri_ to beat the _Goa'uld_ and they really hate the fact. Xenophobic and isolationist; hell-bent on forging a cultural identity at all costs. Hard to blame them, after what they've suffered, but hard to deal with, too.

When they're finally allowed inside, she sees Teal'c. The lines of weariness and anger in his face remind her too much of Jack. Both of them trapped playing politics. Like Jacob/Selmak's was, his position's a difficult one. On the one hand, he's a hero of the Liberation. On the other, he's known to have strong _Tau'ri_ sympathies. No one has done more for them, but the Jaffa don't entirely trust him. The Colonel makes her speech again, introducing SG-35 and stating the reason for their visit.

"Do the humans of Earth not trust the Jaffa, that they must send guards to ensure Dr. Jackson's safety?" A Jaffa she doesn't know has spoken, and President Gerak isn't shutting her down.

"These are not guards," Dani says. "As Colonel McCluskey has said, I am a member of SG-35. This is the rest of my team." _And the team that plays together, slays together._ She used to hate having to kill Jaffa, knowing they were only helpless pawns of the _Goa'uld_. Just now, she wishes they'd killed more of them.

"You were a member of SG-1. Why have you not come with them?"

"As I am certain the minister is well aware, the SG-1 of which I was a member was decommissioned long ago. I am now a member of SG-35. I have other duties as well, and in pursuit of them, I wish to study in your archives, as there is information there which exists nowhere else in the Galaxy," she says. They settled all this before SG-35 stepped through the Gate, but the Council's obviously looking for some pretext to toss them back again. Or just annoy the hell out of them.

"And how long to you believe your research will require, Dr. Jackson?" Ah, Gerak has finally woken up.

"That's really hard to say. Naturally I hope for your patience and forbearance, and we certainly don't wish to cause you any inconvenience." They have no idea how long she'll need. If they need more than a few hours, they'll either need to negotiate to go home and return, or get Sammy to send some of their gear through.

"Your very presence here is an inconvenience. The thought that you ask us to feed and house you as well--"

"I shall feed and shelter Danielle Jackson and her team."

"Of course, Teal'c. The Council would expect nothing less of _you_ ," Gerak says blightingly.

_Oh._ She sees it now. This isn't about them. It's about _Teal'c_.

"I would never dishonor my Master's teachings by refusing aid to one whom I have fought beside in battle, were such aid within my power to give. Nor would you, Gerak."

Point to Teal'c. There's a brief exchange in Jaffa -- either Gerak doesn't know she speaks it, or doesn't care. Gerak points out she's _Tau'ri_ (and presumably, exempt from the warrior code Teal'c learned at Master Bra'tac's knee); Teal'c says she's not only a warrior in her own right, and his comrade in battle, but the widow of his brother-in-arms O'Neill, to whom he owes an unrepaid blood-debt. _Tau'ri_ or not, she's under his protection, and he'll provide for her needs and the needs of her household while they're on Dakara. (She'd better brief the Colonel as soon as she can. This doesn't really change anything -- it might improve their position a little -- but it affects _her_ position here, and that may cause problems.)

"Very well," Gerak says, switching back to English. "Teal'c has agreed to be responsible for your behavior while you are here. I suggest you remember that."

She assures President Gerak they will.

After that, they're escorted from the Council Chamber to a waiting room, where they're told to ... wait. Someone will come to take them to the Archives as soon as possible, they're told. John looks as close to stunned as she's ever seen him. She's not quite sure why.

"All right. This is ... interesting," Hamilton says.

Hicks sits down on one of the hard wooden benches that line the room and leans back, closing his eyes.

"Not quite what we were led to expect," Colonel McCluskey says neutrally.

Dani sighs. She pulls off her glasses and rubs her eyes; she's starting to get another damned eyestrain headache and they haven't even gotten to the Archives yet. She's in heels and her feet hurt; hiking over rough ground, all those marble floors. And neutral tone of voice or not, Dani knows McCluskey wants answers. She takes a deep breath.

"Okay. Here's the deal. Teal'c's taking personal responsibility for us, like Gerak said. It's all political: they're hoping we'll make him look bad. Teal'c's pretext for taking responsibility for us is based on my past relationship with him, and his with Jack, and the fact I'm Jack's ...widow. Jack and Teal'c were ... brothers. In Jaffa society, when your brother dies, you take his widow into your household and make provision for her if her own family can't; I'm an orphan, Teal'c knows that, and for all I know, he's explaining that to Gerak right now. To top things off, in the Council chamber, Teal'c told Gerak there was an unrepaid blood-debt between him and Jack. I have no idea what he means by that, but Jaffa take things like that _very_ seriously."

"So... what? Teal'c's gonna marry you now?" John asks. It's a rhetorical question. (There's a form of ritual polygamy in Jaffa society. Jack knew that.)

She shakes her head. "I don't think so. But he'll certainly take care of me and, ah, my 'household' while I'm here. Um, that's all of you for the duration of our visit, Colonel."

"Good to know," Colonel McCluskey says. "Just as long as he doesn't take it too seriously."

"Colonel McCluskey, Teal'c takes _everything_ seriously."

They don't really dare do much of anything but sit and wait, but it isn't more than three quarters of an hour Teal'c comes. He holds out his arms and she flings herself into them. He hugs her tightly; a brief embrace.

"You should not have come here, Danielle Jackson," he says softly. He looks past her, to John. He knows perfectly well who John is. He was there.

"We had to," she says. "I'm sorry, Teal'c."

"Then I will conduct you to the archives, where you may begin your researches. Afterward we shall retire to my apartments, where we shall engage in casual conversation pertaining to our current lives."

Casual. Right.

"Lead the way," McCluskey says.

The Jaffa archives are huge. Some of its holdings are texts written in secret, preserved and handed down through the generations. A few are texts the _Goa'uld_ created for the instruction of the Jaffa: mythologies, litanies, rituals. Some are books _about_ the _Goa'uld_ the Jaffa have picked up from who knows where. (The _Goa'uld_ had no need of a written history; they had genetic memory to serve them.) The Jaffa, except for the warrior and priest castes, were illiterate: Teal'c could read, but Drey'auc could not. What need did breeders and farmers have of reading and writing? They existed to serve their Gods and incubate the next generation of _Goa'uld_.

Teal'c introduces them to Che'ak, the Commander of the Archives, and explains their purpose there, and says Che'ak is to provide her with anything she requires until his return. Though Che'ak's command of English is very good, it mysteriously vanishes the moment Teal'c leaves. He looks at her blankly as she asks him for references on Jaffa god-marks. She switches to the Jaffa dialect and repeats her request, smiling at him expectantly. She wonders if she ever faced him in the field. Che'ak smiles faintly. She suspects the answer's 'yes.'

_"‹I believe the archives hold the material that you require, Scholar Jackson. If you and your servants will accompany me, we may begin.›"_

_"‹I am grateful for a swift beginning to my task, Archive Commander, as are my battle-comrades of the False God's Eye.›"_ There's no simple way to translate 'SG Team' into Jaffa.

Piles of scrolls in baskets -- Jaffa cultural technology is a mix of medieval and futuristic, making few stops in between -- have been brought and set on a long table in a study room. Braziers line the walls. She could be in the Great Library at Alexandria, thousands of years ago.

_"‹Here is one of the records of our enslavement to the False Gods. I fear it is not complete. But it may be of assistance. When you are finished with it, I will bring another.›"_

_"‹I thank you for your assistance to me, Archive Commander. It is all I could have asked.›"_

Che'ak regards her for a moment. It's impossible to guess his age. Like all adult Jaffa, he could be anywhere between thirty and a hundred and fifty -- the symbiote extended the lives of the Jaffa to nearly two centuries in some cases. They don't know yet how long tretonin will extend the Jaffa's lives. It may even shorten them.

_"‹Did you ever believe, this day would come, Scholar Jackson? That you and I would face each other without weapons between us?›"_

So they _have_ seen each other before. At least he's seen her. She doesn't remember him. It's possible she never saw his face. A lot of dungeons, spaceships, alien planets, a lot of Serpent Guards in full armor trying to kill them all.

_"‹I always hoped it would, Archive Commander. All of us hoped for that, Teal'c most of all.›"_

"I shall leave you to your work," Che'ak says in English. "Assistant Mereth will remain. You may address your needs to her." He bows. She bows. They're alone, except for a young Jaffa woman standing in the corner. She has neither a god-mark nor the Circle of Liberation on her forehead. Too young to be marked as any god's property before Dakara, Dani guesses. The age of tattooing varied from population to population, but it was generally later for girls than for boys. It was the first of the major coming-of-age rituals in the religion the _Goa'uld_ imposed upon the Jaffa. The second was _prata_ \-- the implantation of the _prim'ta_.

"I have _got_ to learn that language," Hamilton sighs.

"I can teach you," Dani offers. "It's related to Ancient Egyptian, so if you have any of the Semitic tongues, it should be fairly easy."

Hamilton looks at her with a half-smile and a shrug. "Latin and Greek," he says. "French. Spanish. A little German."

She glances at McCluskey. "Farsi," McCluskey says. "Arabic, Russian, Spanish. A few phrases of this and that. Nothing to brag on."

"Don't look at me," Hicks says. "I don't even speak English."

She doesn't bother to ask John. She already knows. Fluent Spanish. Pretty good German. Can get by in Russian, but understands more than he speaks. Absolutely refuses to admit he understands Farsi. Knows a bit of _Goa'uld_ by now. Also both Latin and its Ancient root. And whatever _John's_ learned since.

"Well," she says to all of them, "language lessons when you want them. Right now, we all know what we're looking for, and this will go a lot faster with five pairs of eyes. Just be sure to put the scrolls back in the same basket you got them from."

The SGC killed -- SG-1 killed personally -- less than a dozen _Goa'uld_. At the height of their power, there were _thousands_. Ra ruled over twelve System Lords, each of whom controlled a portion of the _Goa'uld_ Empire. Beneath them were the myriad of lesser _Goa'uld_ , from those who directly served the System Lords -- or challenged them for position -- to those who held only a single planet, or part of one. Once Ra found Earth ten thousand years ago, all of them had Jaffa. And all of them marked their Jaffa. The book that she's looking at is -- for lack of a better term -- a _catalogue_ of the _Goa'uld_ , with a short description of each one, its titles, its principal residences. Each entry is headed with a symbol; the same one the Jaffa belonging to that _Goa'uld_ are marked with. The symbols match nothing in any of the _Goa'uld_ scripts she knows: they seem to be pictographic representations of the _Goa'uld_ themselves. (These are what the others are looking at, since none of them can read the language.) She opens her briefcase and removes a small camera, carefully photographing each page. (She knows she won't be allowed to borrow the book.) She's going much slower than the others, since she can both read the language, and is photographing. Her headache is forgotten. So much to learn. So much knowledge to be lost if these fragile scrolls are lost or destroyed. These are records of _Goa'uld_ of whom she's never even heard, _Goa'uld_ who took the names of gods whose names sound like gibberish. They've impersonated whole alien pantheons, played gods on a hundred thousand worlds. Raided Earth and populated the Galaxy with human slaves, yes. But only for the last ten thousand years, and the _Goa'uld_ are millennia older than that. She wonders if they took human bodies to these alien planets. She knows human bodies interface best with _Goa'uld_ technology. That's why the Galaxy's dotted with human slave colonies started by the _Goa'uld_. That's why they made Jaffa out of humans.

"Hey, you done with that yet?" John nudges her with his knee. "You're not supposed to be reading. You're supposed to be looking."

"There's so much here." And it probably wouldn't lead them to Ereshkigal even if she could find information about her, because there's little hope they could coordinate the information about Ereshkigal's domain with any Gate address they have in their dialing computers. And she may well have moved on from her ancient throneworld. In fact, she almost undoubtedly has. Dani pushes her glasses up and rubs her eyes.

"Lots of scrolls. Lots of baskets," John says, nudging. She skims through the rest of the scroll quickly and reaches for the next one.

They're nowhere near finished by the time the Archives close for the day. Che'ak returns for them in person; a mark of honor. He conducts them back to the Reception Chamber, where Teal'c is waiting. Dani requests permission of Che'ak to return tomorrow to continue her research. He grants it graciously.

Once she would have been delighted at how smoothly things were going, how well she was getting along with the local population. Now the endless bow and scrape of diplomacy grates on her nerves. She hears the words no one says. It's always been her greatest strength as a linguist and translator of alien cultures. And so she hears Che'ak's satisfaction in holding power over SG-1 -- even symbolically, after all the battles are over. And it makes her angry. She can't afford to be angry. (And SG-1 is gone.)

Teal'c conducts them from the Reception Chamber. He doesn't actually live on Dakara, he tells them as they walk. His home is still on Chulak. Ishta's there. But he has a residence here for when the Council's in session. He looks forward, he says, to welcoming them to his home on Chulak at some future time.

He watches John as he speaks. Dani wonders what he's looking for.

#

Teal'c's apartments are large, and of course there are servants; Jaffa culture is still organized along feudal lines. Teal'c shows them to their rooms -- two rooms with a connecting door -- and tells them they will have an opportunity to rest, and to change if they wish, before the evening meal. He bows. She bows. Then the five of them are finally alone. After a moment, the men walk through to the other room.

The room she's de facto sharing with Colonel McCluskey contains a gigantic bed suitable for orgies and a couple of large divans. The entire team could sleep here in perfect -- if intimate -- comfort. There are robes laid out on the bed. She kicks off her shoes, groaning in relief, and heads for the bed to inspect the offerings.

"Going to change for dinner, Doctor?" the Colonel asks.

"Ya sure you betcha," she says. After so many years, she's picked up more than a few of Jack's pet phrases.

"Should we?" the Colonel asks.

Dani considers the matter. "I think you might be more comfortable, Colonel, though it isn't absolutely expected. Depending on the ... political affiliations ... of Teal'c's household, though, it might make things easier all around."

"We'll change, then." McCluskey goes to the connecting door. "Gentlemen, fancy dress for the party tonight."

Hamilton grins at Colonel McCluskey and closes the door between the two rooms.

#

Jaffa robes are comfortable -- much more comfortable than her dress suit -- and she's worn them before. Teal'c's even found sandals to fit her; well, it's not as if he doesn't know her size. She helps the Colonel get the layers on in the right order. John's probably doing the same in the other room. God knows how he'll explain knowing how. When she's dressed, Dani flops down on one of the divans.

"Pretty fancy place," the Colonel says, looking around.

"Used to belong to Ba'al," Dani says.

"System Lord," the Colonel says. "He's still out there, isn't he?"

"Unfortunately." One of the smart ones. Allied with Anubis, but managed to survive the wreck of Dakara. Nobody knows what happened to him, but not for lack of trying. There've been a thousand reports of his death, none confirmed. The SGC's fairly sure he's still alive. Somewhere.

There's a knock at the connecting door. It opens a crack. "Colonel? You decent?" Hamilton asks.

"Come on in, boys," McCluskey says. Hamilton, John, and Hicks enter. Only Hamilton looks really comfortable in the robes.

Jack always hated playing dress-up.

"Great place for a pillow fight," John says, picking up one of the cushions. Dani gets up and looks through the door into the other room. It contains three large divans -- no orgy bed -- but there's a distinct lack of ... cushions. Still, it looks comfortable enough.

"Happy to swap," she says.

"I think we'll leave things just the way they are," Colonel McCluskey says firmly.

#

They make polite small-talk over dinner, something Dani can do, after ten years in Washington, in her sleep. What's tearing her apart inside is trying to decide if the man she trusted with her life for eight years can be trusted now. Does she do the actual thing she came to Dakara to do? Does she tell Teal'c about PR9-878, Ereshkigal, the Jaffa looting the warehouse for _prim'ta_ , the _Tok'ra_ intending to buy a sarcophagus from the Jaffa? Or not? Memories of Jack, of Washington, of ten years of concessions and endless tiny failures, tucked safely away--

_\--like the flag that covered his casket--_

\--crowd to the forefront of her mind. Power changes people. Power that's been forced upon them, even more so. Jack, Teal'c, Sammy ... all of them were forced to take up power they didn't want. She's the only one who escaped.

"You seem distracted, Danielle Jackson."

She wasn't. Really. But Teal'c can read her better than anyone else left alive. Nearly. "Long day. The archives are fascinating. I could spend years here."

He inclines his head, acknowledging the compliment. And the fact she's dodging his point. "Perhaps you would care to walk above the city before you retire? I am certain you would find it soothing. And the winds die down with evening."

"That would be great. Ah, don't wait up for me, guys. Colonel."

John grins at her lazily. "Oh, we'll keep ourselves amused. I haven't won all the Major's money yet."

"In your dreams, Doctor," Hamilton says.

The winds _do_ drop with evening on Dakara. It's also damned cold. At least she has a cloak. They walk almost the entire way back to the Stargate. The sandals make the trip easier on her feet.

"Now we may talk privately," Teal'c says.

Yes. She'd been pretty sure they couldn't do that in his rooms. "There's so much I have to tell you," she says. "And none of it good." Down deep inside she's praying he doesn't know it already. That he's still Teal'c, the Teal'c she knows. Or that -- if he does know everything she's decided to tell him -- he'll never let her know.

"It was most unsettling to see what seems to be O'Neill again," Teal'c says.

_John_. "He's ... not. Exactly."

"He is an Asgard clone of General O'Neill. He is in nearly every way identical," Teal'c says reprovingly.

Teal'c doesn't like John. Why? "But he's lived a different life for twelve years. He's different," she says slowly, hoping Teal'c will give her a clue.

"I do not observe a profound difference. And I do not believe General O'Neill would wish you to pursue a relationship with such a simulacrum of himself."

She can't think of anything to say. (For a moment she imagines Jack alive so she can ask his opinion, but simply gives up. It's an impossible stretch of the imagination.) She can't imagine how Teal'c _knows_. Dakara's offworld, and she and John have rules about how they behave offworld. They've barely looked at each other since they've stepped through the Gate. But however Teal'c found out -- or guessed -- this is the last thing she expected to hear from him. She thinks of denying it outright, but she never tried to lie to Teal'c, back in the day. The need for it never came up, so she didn't have to find out if she would have compromised her principles. Or whether it was even possible But she can't -- won't -- lie to Teal'c now.

"Jack's dead," she says simply.

"Indeed. You must remember this."

"Oh, god, Teal'c, do you think a day goes by that I forget it?" But they do, lots of them, whole days -- lately -- when she can forget Jack is dead. Because John is alive.

"And not dishonor his memory -- or yourself -- with this relationship," Teal'c continues, as if she hasn't spoken.

This conversation is making her head spin. John _is_ Jack -- isn't Jack -- in every way that matters. She can't follow Teal'c's logic, but it never was an easy task. Why does he want her to give up John? How does he know she _has_ John in the first place?

She takes a deep breath. "Please believe me, Teal'c, that I would never -- _never_ \-- do anything to ... dishonor ... Jack. I loved him. I still do. You don't stop loving someone because they die." It would be a lot easier if she could just decide whether Jack's actually dead or not. Because he is and he isn't.

"Indeed you do not, Danielle Jackson."

She concentrates on her breathing. In -- out. Deep and even. Something Teal'c taught her, actually, when he taught her to _kel'no'reem_. "We have to talk about something else now. We have to talk about the _Goa'uld_."

"The _Goa'uld_ have been defeated." Teal'c sounds certain. This is everybody's party line and has been for over a decade. But it's always been more accurate to say the power of the _Goa'uld_ Empire has been destroyed. The _Goa'uld_ themselves were never remotely cohesive enough to be defeated _en bloc_. You'd need to kill every last one of them to defeat them. And they haven't.

"We think there's a _Goa'uld_ Queen out there. One who has been awakened recently. An old one, very powerful. Hathor's sister. Her name is Ereshkigal." _Please, please, please don't tell me you knew..._

Teal'c says nothing. He was the only male in the entire SGC not enthralled by Hathor.

"It would be most illuminating to hear how you came by this information," Teal'c says at last. His voice is calm, but then, Teal'c was always calm, back in the old days. She has to believe he doesn't know. And that if she tells him, he'll do the right thing with the information. The same thing Teal'c would have done once, once upon a time. The thing she once thought was the only thing anyone could possibly do.

She tells him about the Hansard, about the canopic jar, about going to PR9-878. About meeting the Jaffa there, and guessing they'd come to harvest _prim'ta_. About the fact over a hundred _prim'ta_ were already missing from the warehouse. About going to the _Tok'ra_ , being stonewalled by the _Tok'ra_ , hearing -- off the record -- the _Tok'ra_ Council is planning to negotiate with the Jaffa for sarcophagi to extend their lifespans. About The Garden of the Gods.

Teal'c puts a hand on her arm. His touch startles her a little. "I did not know all of this," he says. "Believe me, Danielle Jackson."

It takes a moment for his words to sink in. He didn't know _all_ of this? He knew _some_ of it, but not _all_? She stares at him in horror.

He regards her sorrowfully. "You do not understand what tretonin has done to the Jaffa."

"Freed you," she says.

"To experience _kek_ ," Teal'c answers. _Kek_ : the Jaffa word means weakness. Death. In the Jaffa language, the two words are the same. "We have no physicians or healers of the sick as the _Tau'ri_ do," Teal'c says. "We have never needed them. The tretonin is not as efficient as our symbiotes once were, and Jaffa sicken and die. Nor does it extend our lives. What mother would see her child live only half his allotted years if there were a way to give him more?"

The first Jaffa were created from humans brought to Dakara when Earth was first discovered, and changed. The symbiotes gave them great strength, enhanced -- and perfect -- health, and an extended lifespan. Without them, it seems, they have none of those things. When the SGC first got tretonin from the _Tok'ra_ , Teal'c was weaker on it than with his symbiote. He needed to sleep for the first time. He was vulnerable to poisons, to disease. He healed far more slowly than before -- though still faster than mere _Tau'ri_. They've never been able to study the long-term effects of tretonin on Jaffa. But now, it seems, the Jaffa have. And if she understands what Teal'c's telling her, the longer the Jaffa are on tretonin, the less time they had a symbiote in the first place, the closer they become to human when they take the drug. The tretonin replaces their immune system. That's all. And having had ... _more_ ... the Jaffa don't care for that effect at all.

"You knew the Jaffa were seeking out _prim'ta_ ," she says. Teal'c bows his head, saying nothing. Just one mistake, just one Jaffa who doesn't manage to kill his -- or her -- _prim'ta_ before it matures, and it won't be a Jaffa. It will be a _Goa'uld_. "Well, congratulations, Teal'c," she says, and her voice is shaking with fury. "In a couple of years, you're going to be up to your asses in snakes again. You won't even have to go looking for them." It hardly matters, does it, if Ereshkigal's out there? With her or without her, the _Goa'uld_ are coming back. Everything they lost -- her, Jack, Sammy -- all their friends, family, loved ones who died -- it was all for nothing.

_"Do you think I wished for this, Danielle Jackson? You?"_ Teal'c grips her arm so hard she's sure there are going to be bruises.

She blinks back tears. _No._ Just like Jack. A thousand compromises. Little deaths. Living with the enemy and being unable to fight. "No. Oh, god, no, Teal'c. I'm sorry. It's just... We worked so _hard_... We gave up _so much_..."

Teal'c's expression softens as he looks at her. "O'Neill would say the future is not what it has been broken down as," he says after a moment's thought.

_Cracked up to be, Teal'c. The future's not what it's cracked up to be._ "Yes," she says, drawing a ragged breath. "He would. Oh, Teal'c, help me. I've got to find The Garden of the Gods. I'm sure Ereshkigal's there. We've got to stop her."

"Indeed, she must be destroyed," Teal'c says. "And now it is time for us to return."

It's only as they reach the palace gates that she realizes Teal'c hasn't -- exactly -- agreed to help her.

#

She'd shown the sketch she'd made of the Jaffa mark to Teal'c hoping for a quick resolution to her quest, but he hadn't recognized it. At least, he said he didn't. She has to believe he's telling the truth. It's not impossible. Not even unlikely. Thousands, even tens of thousands, of _Goa'uld_ lords, petty and great. No Jaffa -- not even a former First Prime to a System Lord -- would know them all. But she finds the mark at last, after two more days of searching. The two Jaffa who were marked bore the mark of Anu, the head of the Sumerian pantheon, cognate with Ra. But probably -- she's guessing -- predating Ra. Or at least predating Ra's human incarnation, if Anu is actually Ra. Maybe the _Goa'uld_ change names now and then. How would she know? What they actually know about the _Goa'uld_ she could stuff into her field pack and have room left over for most of her gear.

The trouble with the idea of Jaffa marks belonging to Anu (in the sense of there being Jaffa marked as Anu's property) is that Anu never had any Jaffa. Anu predates Ra. Anu had -- would have to have had -- a Unas host, and been served by lesser _Goa'uld_ and ordinary slaves. So it can't be Anu's mark she saw. It was, though. The mark on the foreheads of the two Jaffa and the mark in the book identified as Anu's mark are identical. The fact it's impossible doesn't change the fact it's true.

She finds nothing that might lead them to Ereshkigal.

She isn't sure what she expected Jaffa freedom to be like. Not this. Their lives now are a thousand times better than they were under the _Goa'uld_. A million times. But she'd always thought they'd be ... happier. And maybe that they'd have a better idea of what they wanted to do with their freedom besides going back to slavery.

She feels an intense sense of relief when they step back into the SGC. It's a relief to change from her suit into fresh BDUs. She spent most of the last two days in Jaffa robes -- they all did -- but it was important to go out in public dressed as _Tau'ri_ , so they've all been in the same clothes for three days.

"I am so damned tired of raw fish and things with eyes," McCluskey groans from the other shower stall. "I am going out tonight and buying the largest steak I can lift."

Most Jaffa food is served raw, and most of the protein in Jaffa cuisine is fish; taking care of large food-mammals simply occupied up too much in the way of crops and labor to suit the _Goa'uld_ in the old days, and the Jaffa are slow to change.

"What about you?" McCluskey asks her.

Dani thinks of the fact the Jaffa are going back to symbiotes, something she'll have to tell Sammy at the debriefing. She thinks of her conversation with Teal'c, and of him telling her Jack wouldn't want her to have anything to do with John.

"Colonel," she says evenly, "tonight I am going to go home and get absolutely hammered."

#

Debriefing's just as much fun as she thought it would be. John's been very quiet over the last 48 hours, but after the first night, she's hardly dared even make eye contact with him under Teal'c's roof, and at the archives she'd been both busy and ... _daunted_ ... by the material she'd seen _(so much! so impossible to obtain!)_ that she pretty much ignored all of them. She came home with a briefcase crammed with tapes and notes, and knows she only managed to capture a fraction of what she saw. In the debriefing she starts with the simple stuff: the overview of the situation on Dakara, the fact they identified the mark she saw on the Jaffa on 878 ... and the fact it's a mark it can't possibly be, unless Great God Anu has returned from the dead after something more than ten thousand years. (Or after twenty years, if he's Ra.)

The others present their own information. It's not much, as they've spent the last two and a half days in a culture where they could read nothing and couldn't understand much of the speech. John has the least to say, and finally, _finally_ , her radar kicks in. There's got to be something to account for his studiously blank expression; the fact he's saying so little. Something happened to him on Dakara. Something she doesn't know about.

But now the table's come back round to her. "I briefed Teal'c on the situation the first night we were there. He was already aware of the traffic in _prim'ta_ , but not, apparently, aware of the Jaffa Free Nation's willingness to sell sarcophagi to the _Tok'ra_ , nor that Ereshkigal is at large." Probably. They assume.

"I... wait. He _knew_ about this?" Sammy demands.

"I don't think he knew specifically about the warehouse on 878. But he knew about the trade in _prim'ta_." Dani sighs, and rubs her eyes. She's had a non-stop headache for the last three days; thank god the Jaffa haven't invented fine print yet or she'd be blind as well. "We knew about the other effects of tretonin. Here's one we didn't know about: it shortens Jaffa lifespans considerably."

"How considerably?" McCluskey asks, when nobody else says anything.

Dani shrugs. "I have no idea. Teal'c said something about children living 'half their allotted years,' which kind of implies that if you start on tretonin and never take a symbiote at all, your life will be only as long as an ordinary human's."

"I'm not complaining," Hicks points out.

"The average Jaffa lifespan was one hundred fifty years approximately fifteen years ago," she says. "They're probably not thrilled to be facing less than half that." _Probably. We assume._ They're going entirely on assumptions with the Jaffa these days.

"So what are we going to do about this? We can't have the Jaffa using symbiotes now any more than we could ten years ago," Sammy says. "It's too dangerous. Suggestions?"

Dani thinks of something the NID used once. Sammy will remember it soon; they were both there when it was used. A poison developed by the _Tok'ra_. It kills _Goa'uld_ , though it's harmless to humans. They have the formula. They could make enough of it to blanket Dakara, or any of the other Jaffa worlds. They could send it through the Stargate. A Jaffa on tretonin might survive -- they'd need to test to be sure, but it's possible, even probable, they would; tretonin's based on symbiotes, but it's synthetic. But the poison will be lethal to a Jaffa carrying a symbiote because of the toxins the symbiote releases in its death-agonies.

When did she become what she's always fought so hard against?

"No," she says. "No suggestions."

Sammy dismisses them. She walks out with John. He doesn't take her hand, but their shoulders brush. It's funny. Jack would have put an arm around her shoulders, but never -- not while they were both still at Stargate Command -- considered sleeping with her. John sleeps with her. But he'll almost never touch her while they're underneath The Mountain.

"Coffee?" she asks, as they step into the elevator.

He hesitates. "Better see if I can still find my desk."

Something's actually wrong, then. But pushing was never -- quite -- the way to get at it. Not with Jack. Not with John. "Yeah," she says. "I guess. Have to go by the house tonight and check on it, too. See you later?" He smiles absently but doesn't answer. The elevator stops at his floor first.

Three days absence and Archaeo-Anthropology and Translation is buried. Her in-box is full: master reports from Gate Teams, memos from her staff; nothing she dares take home; it's all too classified. She sets it all aside: she needs to read every single one, and more come through every day. She checks with Nyan. He's been supervising the painters for her. He says everything's been going well and they're doing a good job. She checks her watch to find out what time it is here on Earth and calls the painters. They're on schedule, and expect to finish in an hour or so. Everything's gone as expected.

She tries to settle to her work, but it's hard. She's thinking about John. She's thinking about Teal'c. She's thinking about Jack. And why in god's name would Teal'c think a relationship with John would _dishonor_ what she had with Jack? She knows Jaffa remarry. Teal'c has. But every time she tries, these days, to be absolutely certain in her heart she's laid Jack O'Neill to his final rest, all she feels is a spinning sense of ... _disorientation_. John isn't Jack. Not the same reactions. Never a General. No ten years in Washington and the dying by inches. But he remembers almost all of eight years on SG-1 with her. He remembers Abydos. Skaara. Sha're.

He's been a civilian for the last twelve years. Lived a life she knows nothing about. She's lived a life she won't talk about. She's been out of phase -- insubstantial -- downloaded into a robot body (she's still there, in fact, probably) -- even -- switched bodies with other people. Bodies don't define identity. Memories do. Who you are is what you remember. So... perhaps... John is Jack's brother. In a way. So this is -- technically, legally -- incest. She's been down this road before. She was betrothed to Skaara. Skaara was her brother. She had an affair with Daniel. Her other self. Her quantum twin. Why not with her dead husband's brother?

But the analogy doesn't feel exact. Not a brother, if he remembers everything the brother remembered -- up to a point, at least. And that's the problem, isn't it? Because she'd said it herself, _to_ herself, the first time she'd seen him. _'Jack from the last time they'd all been happy.'_ And constantly being reminded of that is constantly being reminded of a problem she'll never be able to solve now. Because Jack's dead. Only he isn't.

And the paradox, she's very much afraid, is driving her quietly mad.

#

 

 

__

_**

IX. The Lost Weekend

**_

__

She finally manages to bury herself in her work -- everyone in her department needs to touch base, it seems -- surfacing, late-late-late, when Nyan stops by her office to tell her he's leaving and does she want anything before he goes? She checks her watch. It's twenty-hundred. Eight o'clock. _Late_. She shakes her head. "Leaving myself," she says.

"Have a good evening, Dr. Jackson." Fifteen years, and she hasn't been able to persuade him to call her 'Dani'.

"You, too, Nyan." She considers and rejects the idea of hitting the gym before she goes, but decides tomorrow will have to do. (Quarterly medical review for the team in five weeks. She can't afford to get sloppy now.)

John's Jeep isn't there when she gets to the surface. She drives to the (new) house, wishing it were her last stop; the condo's another fifteen minutes away; another twenty-five really, with the roundabout route she has to take to get from the house to the condo because there's no really direct route. The driveway's been plowed, and the walk is shoveled; two of the things she's made arrangements for. The porch light's on. She can key the garage door opener from her SUV now, and does. John's Jeep is already parked inside. She feels an odd flare of territoriality when she sees it. It's irrational; she's asked him to move in with her, and he's said yes. But she hasn't seen or heard from him since the briefing; you'd think he'd at least have called...

It was his house first before it was hers. Yes? No? It's hard to decide. She parks her SUV beside the Jeep and goes in through the kitchen. In the kitchen, the lights are on. John's standing there, staring moodily out toward the living room, eating pizza. She walks in and hears the hum of box fans. Every window in the place is open, and there are big fans in the living room, moving the air. The house reeks of fresh paint, and it's ice-cold. She sets her purse and briefcase down by the door to the garage.

"Thought it could use a little more airing out," he says, not turning around.

"Ya think?" she says, not taking off her coat. "Is there any pizza left?"

He waves at the box, but suddenly she couldn't eat if her life depended on it. Because the absent tone, the language of gestures, all take her back to a place she never wanted to go again. And she'll be living with this man. She asked. He agreed. She walks past him out into the living room. No light except what there is from the kitchen, but she can see everything's white again, as it should be. The day after tomorrow new carpet goes down, and she gets rid of the rest of the colors and textures that don't belong in Jack's house. Four days later, she moves in. With John. Who she apparently has the capacity to make just as miserable as she ever made Jack. What a surprise.

She crosses the living room, away from the light. Up the steps. Down the hall to the bedroom. Moving by instinct and memory. The bedroom's pitch-dark, but she finds the light-switch for the bathroom. Better. The paint-fumes in here are stronger -- the door to the deck is open but there aren't any fans here to move the air. Soon this will be her bedroom (their bedroom). At last. Did she ever actually imagine that, when Jack lived here? Did she think clearly enough for that? Or was she trapped in one long _reaction_ \-- against being the adjunct Simon wanted? Against being the failure the academic community saw? Against losing to the enemies they faced daily through the Stargate? Against what the sight of Jack O'Neill made her feel from the first moment she saw him? Love at first sight is too simple. She'd wanted to kill him the first moment she saw him, with a simple primitive rejection of anything likely to cause ... _change_. She'd felt, by turns, loathing, contempt, and utter confusion in the presence of Jack O'Neill. Relief and grief when he'd left her behind on Abydos at her own request. And then he'd come back, and they had to work together. And she'd loved him and hated him so completely and so thoroughly and so simultaneously the emotions had left her harrowed into a kind of innocence and she had no idea of her feelings for him at all. Except that he was interesting, and in his company she was never bored. Most people bored her.

And then, finally -- because of Daniel -- it all tipped over. She'd realized what she felt for Jack before Daniel came of course -- it had taken years, but she knew -- but because of Daniel she'd discovered the important thing--

_\--the disastrous thing--_

\--Jack loved her too. Because before Daniel the intensity of her feelings blinded her to his. But she'd never, actually, had _fantasies_. She wonders, now, why not? SG-1 had hallucinations, false memories, entire _personality implants_ to help them confuse dreams with reality. And she'd never even laid in bed on a lazy Sunday afternoon and imagined being Mrs. Jack O'Neill. Living here in his house. Sleeping in his bed _with_ him. Not even after she _knew_.

She slugged down enough ibuprofen and coffee back at the Mountain to knock out her headache -- the one she swore to Erin that she didn't have -- but she's starting to get another one from the paint fumes. It's late and she's tired. No dinner and she desperately wants a drink. Several drinks. She walks through the open glass door and goes out on the deck. Her boots sink into the crust of snow. She reaches up with gloved fingers to touch -- beneath the swaddling muffler -- the diamond star around her neck. John's gift, the night he promised to come live with her. _Come live with me and be my love..._ She wishes Life were that simple. Grand gestures and no aftermath. They could have blown up Dakara and -- poof! -- no more _Goa'uld_. On to the next menace. But the universe isn't like that. Ten years, intercessory menaces, and here come the _Goa'uld_ again. Twenty-five thousand years of Galactic Dominion has given the monsters a certain staying power.

"I thought I might find you here. It's too cold out here. Come inside." John puts a hand on her back. She can feel it through her coat, through the cold, and turns around, into his arms, whether he wants to hold her or not. Because there's, literally, no place else for her to go, and it's not her sense she's losing, but her senses. Her ability to perceive.

But he _does_ want her to, because his arms tighten around her, and he rests his cheek against the top of her head. "Teal'c spoke to you, too," she says, against his chest. She thinks she's finally figured it out. "On Dakara?"

"Oh, yeah." He sounds bitter and resigned and disgusted all at once. "We had a great little chat. He wanted me to be really clear on the fact I wasn't Jack O'Neill and I'd better keep my paws off Jack O'Neill's things. Like his wife."

#

He hadn't known what to expect. On their second evening there, Teal'c gave him their old high-sign over dinner, so he'd slipped out of the room after Hamilton and Hicks sacked out for the night. Dani and McCluskey were already down; so were most of the Jaffa. They wouldn't be noticed. Teal'c got the ball rolling by telling him he wasn't Jack O'Neill and never would be, and had no right ever to pretend he was. A little disconcerting. He thought he and T were better friends than that. Only -- as Teal'c was so subtly reminding him -- _he_ wasn't the guy Teal'c considered a friend. Though he had been, for a while. Before they realized he was nothing but a bad copy and The Other Guy was out there somewhere.

Once they had that out of the way, Teal'c then went on to explain that he -- Teal'c -- was responsible for the safety and protection of O'Neill's widow, Danielle Jackson. That her happiness would not be assured by attempting to pursue a relationship with a reproduction of the man she had loved. That if John did, in fact, actually entertain feelings similar in nature to those possessed by the man responsible for giving him life, he would perform the appropriate action, and sever all ties with Danielle Jackson immediately.

It took him a while to untangle that.

#

_"In the first place, T, the 'man' responsible for giving me life is a little grey guy named Loki -- who, if I ever get my hands on him, is really going to regret messing with either me or Jack O'Neill. Two, why the hell would you think I wouldn't still love Indiana? Okay, I'm not Jack O'Neill. If I had a dime for every time I've heard that -- told myself that -- in the last twelve years, I could probably buy this place. But I remember a lot of stuff he remembers. Including her. And three, since we're both on the same team, it's going to be a little hard to go severing those ties."_

_Teal'c looked a little more pissed off than he'd usually gotten at Jack, as John recalled. "So you will not do as I have advised?"_

_"I'm sorry ... did one of us miss the part where the lowly Tau'ri handed the Jaffa their freedom on a plate and the Jaffa should be a little more grateful? Now -- ten years later -- the woman who saved your ass more times than I can count, who fought day and night to keep you from getting shipped off to some NID petting zoo, who drove all over town looking for candles for you, for crap's sake, comes here wanting to do some light reading, and you're giving me -- and probably her -- a hard time over something that does not matter one step across the event horizon? Let me give you a hint: Jack O'Neill's dead and he's not coming back. And he never spent twelve years thinking he wasn't ever going to get to see his girl again -- and then got a second chance."_

_"Then we have nothing more to say to each other," Teal'c said._

#

She braces herself against his chest and looks up at him. "He told me ... Jack wouldn't want me to pursue a relationship with ... you. He told me I must not dishonor his memory." She drops her forehead against his chest. Her eyes burn. Paint fumes. Sure.

"I am actually in a position to know Jack O'Neill's exact opinion on this subject," John says, his voice very gentle. "When he was married to Sara, they both knew there was a pretty good chance, any time he went out the door on a mission, he wouldn't come home. They talked about it. He expected her to remarry, especially after... after Charlie came along. He told her it didn't matter who she married, as long as it was a good man. She just laughed at him and said she was going to marry someone else exactly like him. He said he supposed she knew what she was letting herself in for, and it wouldn't be any of his business anyway, because he'd be dead, so she should suit herself."

She can imagine him saying it, sitting at the kitchen table in the suburban kitchen in the house she's never seen. Sara was good with her hands. Liked to fix cars. Jack met her while he was stationed in Texas, he told her once. Sara Tyler. That's why Charlie's middle name was Tyler. "Why would Teal'c...?" she says.

"I don't know."

"The _Goa'uld_ have cloning." Had cloning.

"Maybe that's why."

"I'm going to have to mention this to Sammy. I just didn't... want to bring it up to the whole table."

"Oh, yeah, I could see McCluskey's face now, when you mentioned the fact that Minister Teal'c took time out of his busy schedule to lecture you on your sex life," John says.

"I told McCluskey I was going to go home tonight and get hammered," she says.

"I'll close up the windows and we can go, then. We can take my car; you shouldn't drive if you're going to drink. It should only take a couple of drinks to put you out. You're a cheap date these days." He'd told her once she wasn't as cheap a date as his wife.

Jack told her that.

She spends the night warm and safe in his bed, having gotten there with assistance after three stiff Scotches. The alarm jars them both awake at 4:30; it's set early so John can get in treadmill time at the Mountain in the morning. He turns on the light, smiling at her. Reality slides around her like quicksand and for just a moment, love and trust are uncomplicated. But the moment passes, as she reminds herself of who they both are.

Her morning workout makes her muscles ache. Longer one tonight, unless they catch a mission, but it's Thursday -- they should be safe through the weekend, barring emergencies. She moves in -- _they_ move in -- next Tuesday. Might be offworld, then. What will she do this weekend -- catch up on her paperwork? Or pack? (Decisions, decisions.) She manages to grab Sammy for fifteen minutes to add her coda to yesterday's report. (Teal'c doesn't want her to date John -- he spoke to both her and John about it, separately.)

"Any idea why?" Sammy asks.

"He said it'd dishonor Jack's memory. We didn't really get into it. I wanted to cover the stuff I'd gone to brief him on."

"Teal'c loves you," Sammy says. They both know that.

"And John and I are moving in together," she says. And John has asked her to marry him. And she's said no. And she doesn't think that discussion's over.

"Dani..." Sammy sighs.

"I'm sorry," she says. For what, she isn't sure. Being incapable of doing what she knows Sammy wants? Her disastrous taste in personal relationships? Her legendary capacity for self-destruction?

"This isn't a good idea," Sammy says carefully.

"John would never do anything to hurt me," she answers. She believes that. She trusts him.

Sammy sighs. "Well, it looks like you won't be going back to Dakara any time soon. Or -- probably -- to Chulak."

"Probably not," Dani agrees.

Evening workout. Two hours. It's still hard, but SG-35's quarterly medical review looms in February.

February. And Jack will have been dead a year. She doesn't want to think about that, but from the first time she touched the quantum mirror her imagination has presented her with Life lived as a skein of alternate possibilities: Daniel's arrival only made it more vivid. And now, her body cocooned in the metered restraint of the weight machine, her mind constrained by the mercilessness of the reality of her real life, her imagination flees to fantasy. A year at the cabin. A year of retirement. Would she have gone on consulting? she wonders. They'd both been ... desperate ... to put Washington behind them, but her skills are unique, and needed. (Or at least wanted.) Would Sammy have called? Would she have said yes? Or would she and Jack have been happy together, shutting the world out?

So many possibilities. The world isn't that far away when you have a computer. She could have done a lot from the cabin. Taught. Written books she could actually publish. Could they have been ... happy? Or would they have had to face the fact they never could? That the idea they could -- _ever_ \-- make each other happy was just another cruel illusion? Ties forged in the heat of battle -- facing death, facing torture -- are the strongest there are. They'd had those. They'd been willing to die for each other (and, in fact, they did). But to live with each other, in times of peace? They never got a chance to find out, and so she'll never know if she could have made Jack happy. If they could have been happy together. Simply. Uncomplicatedly. Jack made her happy, even at her most miserable; he was her heaven and her hell, her touchstone. Her goal. Never got there. Never will. Can't imagine -- still -- what an ordinary marriage to Jack O'Neill would have been like. And now there's John.

And she realizes -- in a moment of bordering-on-anoxia-induced clarity -- that the impossible riddle of the past is one she _has_ to solve. Because she ruined Jack's life and she won't destroy John's life too. She loves Jack too much.

Gasping, dizzy -- both with discovery and exertion -- she staggers away from the weight machine and leans against the wall, panting. John isn't here. Thank god for small mercies. John has gone home to pack. They're moving Tuesday. Jack -- John -- maybe she should Gate through to Chulak and move in with Teal'c. That would solve everything. Or maybe she should go to Kheb. What would be on Kheb this time? Clarity? That'd be nice. Or not. Clarity would hurt. Clarity would involve absolute truth. She's sought that all her life, and it's never brought her anything but pain. The truth about Egypt. The truth about Skaara. The truth about herself. At least she should be used to pain by now.

She dresses and goes home.

She works through the weekend -- standard shifts -- and gets mostly caught up. John packs. He's borrowed her SUV; he's taking advance loads of things to the house. She's got his Jeep. The new carpet looks good, but it reeks of glue and solvent; she can't stay inside the house for more than a few minutes. The weather holds clear, though, and John says it'll be aired out enough for her to survive there by the time the furniture comes.

There's a room over the garage they've decided will be his; workroom and study. She'll get the second bedroom downstairs for her office. He has a lot of things still in storage to move in later. She doesn't. She's not sure how her piano and his television are going to manage to share space in the living room. They'll have to figure something out. The curtains for the bedroom have come. He calls to tell her he's put them up.

Nice to have a man about the house.

#

Monday morning. Planning meeting for the week. Department heads and the General. Everything goes smoothly -- 35's going out again, but she and Major Hamilton have a lot of talking to do via MALP first before they go barging in on the Orand, so it probably won't be this week -- and then, at the end of the meeting, as they're all getting up to leave, Sammy drops a hand-grenade into her lap. "Dani, a word?"

She waits. The others file out and the two of them are alone.

"Dani, I want you to go to Washington."

"Washington?" She can't believe Sammy's asking her to go back there.

"I need someone to brief General Landry on the situation on Dakara and bring him up-to-date about the _Goa'uld_ problem."

She wants to tell Sammy to send somebody else, but it isn't Sammy who's asking, it's General Carter. And General Carter isn't asking her. She's ordering her. She knows she should say something, but Sammy's got her game face on, the one she wears when she has to say things she doesn't want to say. Because who else could she send?

"You're the best person to go. Sgt. O'Reilly has made all your travel arrangements. You'll be seeing General Landry first thing tomorrow morning and you should be able to leave right after that. Sorry to make you miss moving day."

"Nyan can handle everything. I didn't think I'd be here for it anyway," she says automatically. Numbly.

"That's settled, then. You'll have a couple of hours to get your notes in order before you leave."

She doesn't go to her office. She goes to John's lab. He's staring into his computer, a cup of coffee balanced precariously on the edge of his desk. "I won't be here tomorrow," she says without preamble.

"We going somewhere?" he asks, not looking up.

" _I_ won't be here tomorrow. General Carter's sending me to Washington."

That gets his attention. He turns around. Stands up. "For how long?"

"Overnight. Briefing General Landry about Dakara."

His face settles quickly into anger. Anger was a luxury for Jack; it had too many consequences for a commander. John's temper shows more easily. "I should--"

"Can't send anyone else," she says. She hates the fact it's an effort to keep her voice steady. And that the first place she came was here. He comes and puts his arms around her. She buries her face in his chest. For just a moment she doesn't care how it looks, that she's supposed to be strong and give nothing away.

"Dani..." he says. "Just... remember who you are _now_. Archaeo-Linguistics. SG-35. And when it's over, you're coming back here. To me."

She pushes herself away. "I'd better... Briefing notes. Then I have to... Pack."

"Sure. I'll take care of things here."

"Don't blow anything up," she says.

"Nothing I can't fix."

She walks quickly away.

#

He'd really like to go give Carter a piece of his mind. Who the hell does she think she is? Does she think Indy's made of stone? Only... he knows who Carter thinks she is. Carter's the General now. And sometimes Generals have to do things that really suck. Hammond did. But why does it have to be _Indy_? Carter could have sent somebody else. She could have sent McCluskey. Only McCluskey didn't talk to Teal'c. McCluskey wasn't there when Shallan talked to _him_ , either. McCluskey isn't one of their last surviving _Goa'uld_ experts, somebody who's gotten up close and personal with the snakes. McCluskey isn't The Legendary Dr. Jackson. And Carter knows politics, and Washington, and how to Play The Game. That's why she's sending Indy. Who also knows all those things.

Is 'The Game' worth it? Might as well ask if _Earth's_ worth it. Because that's what it comes down to, in the end. Playing 'The Game' -- the politics, the lies, the compromises -- keeps Earth alive and whole. It's game he's played ... most of his life. Two lives, in fact. He sacrificed friends to it. A marriage. His and Sara's. (The Other Guy's and Indy's, he's guessing.) Himself, in a way probably only Indy could explain to him. Which is what it all comes back around to, because he'd always been willing to make the sacrifices -- except when it came down to Indy, though he made them there, too, when he had to. Or the Other Guy did. All the way down the line, to the bitter end. But -- exactly -- how long does it have to go on? Until Indy dies a final time? Or until she doesn't care whether she dies or not? Carter just has to see -- _he_ always saw -- there are just some ways in which you can't use people, whether it's expedient or not.

It's not good for them.

It's not good for the mission.

#

She gets back late Tuesday. Much later than she planned, or intended, because everything that could possibly go wrong in Washington did. She had to see a lot more people from the old days than she'd wanted to, accept too many condolences. And then there's the weather. She gets out of Dulles on time -- on a later flight than she'd been originally booked on, because she had to take an extra meeting -- and then weather holds her up at O'Hare. The only flight she can get is flying in to Denver, not Colorado Springs. It's two am in Washington and midnight in Denver when her plane lands, and she rents a car, whiplashed into a surreal somnambulance by two days of time-changes and far too much coffee. It's snowing heavily, and saner heads would rent a hotel room for the night. She drives. Her ID keeps her on the road; the State Police are telling people to _go home_ or at least check in to the nearest motel. It's somewhere between two and three in the morning by the time she drives up to her condo. She unlocks it and staggers inside. It's empty.

_Oh._

Today was moving day. Or, to be accurate, _yesterday_. This isn't her home any more. She's freezing and by now she's too tired to swear. It's almost three in the morning and she can't remember the last time she slept. She's wired on adrenaline from the horrors of the flight and the grind of a long drive through what's probably the first major blizzard of the season, and furious at having forgotten _where she lives_.

She leaves the condo and goes out to the car again. She's exhausted, and it's at least half an hour to get from here to the house -- probably more, with the roads in the condition they are -- and this is a rental sedan. No four wheel drive. She's so tired she feels as if she's floating. She knows she isn't safe to drive, even for another half hour. Past and present, the real and the possible, swirl together in her mind as the falling snow covers the windshield. She reaches into her purse and finds her cellphone by touch. She turned it off when she left Washington and forgot to turn it on again. The light of its display is blinding in the darkened car. It's full of messages that came while it was shut down; she'll look at them later. She pages through the menu until she finds the number she needs. John.

Shouldn't call. It's weakness. She sets the phone down and starts the car.

She hates winter, but she drives with the window down, so the cold and wind will keep her awake. The car slews and skates and lugs across frozen unplowed roads. The police stop her -- twice -- and she has to show her Cheyenne Mountain ID to avoid getting a ticket; there's been a curfew here since ten pm, all non-essential traffic off the road. It ends up taking her an hour to reach home.

When she gets there, she sees all the lights are on. For some reason, the driveway's filled with unfamiliar cars, so she parks on the road, slewing into a drift, forces her door open against the snow, and staggers into the driveway. The snow burns her bare legs. By the time she gets that far, John's coming out of the front door. McCluskey's standing behind him in the doorway. The sight of Colonel McCluskey at her house simply baffles her, to the point she stands in the knee-deep snow until John reaches her.

"Where the _hell_ have you been?" John demands. "Don't you know it's snowing? I called your cell -- don't you ever check your damned messages?"

"I drove," she says.

"From O'Hare?" He scoops her up into his arms -- doesn't ask first -- and slogs back through the snow to the door. No point to it. She lost one shoe when he picked her up, and they're ruined anyway. She's dressed for Washington, not a Colorado snowstorm.

"Denver," she manages to say. Her teeth are starting to chatter. Not the homecoming she'd imagined.

"The roads are closed," he points out. They're inside now. Hicks and Hamilton are here, too. There's a fire in the fireplace. Some faint semblance of order in the living room. Furniture. Lamps. A lot of boxes. John sets her on her feet in front of the fire and pulls off her coat. She kicks off her remaining shoe with an effort. It's wet and her feet are swollen. "You're soaked through," John says. "And you look like hell."

"Better get her into the shower, then," McCluskey says briskly. "Then into some dry clothes."

"My suitcase--" she says.

"Hicks will get the suitcase," McCluskey says. John pries the car keys out of her fingers and tosses them to Hicks. Hicks tips them all an ironic salute and heads for the door.

"Come on, Indiana. Bath time," John says.

The bathroom's already set up. And the bedroom seems ready for occupancy as well. Somebody's been busy. The heat and the hot water revive her a little. When she comes out of the shower, she sees John's laid out her pajamas and robe. She checks her watch. It's after four.

"SG-35 is in my living room," she says, when John comes in to check on her.

"And in our bedroom," he points out. (Accurately, since they're both here, and both SG-35.) "Carter let us off the Mountain early to come over here and work on the unpacking. Nyan handled the movers, though. You were supposed to catch a noon flight."

"The meetings ran late. My flight was rescheduled. My connecting flight was cancelled due to weather. The only other flight I could get went into Denver. I drove back."

"Carter told me you'd taken a later flight. I knew you'd gotten off the ground in Chicago, but I didn't know where the hell you were. I tried to call you."

"My phone was off." She hadn't thought about calling him _en route_ , because Washington and John simply didn't belong in the same box in her mind, and once she'd gotten back, she hadn't been thinking clearly at all.

He sighs. "You should have stayed over in Denver."

"I wanted to get home." She isn't going to tell him about forgetting where 'home' was.

He sighs. "Stubborn."

"Tired. Hungry."

"Come have something to eat."

"In my pajamas?"

"I was thinking dining room."

"It's four in the morning. Shouldn't they have gone home?"

John gives her a faintly amused look and doesn't bother to answer.

It seems to be a universal rule that there's one good cook on every SG Team. For theirs, it's Major Hamilton. He brought homemade bread as a housewarming gift, and now, as she sits on a stool in the kitchen watching, converts it into French Toast. There's also a brand-new espresso machine on her counter, courtesy of Colonel McCluskey. Having them here seems so unreal. But SG Teams socialize outside of work. They're almost expected to. It's not the way the Fraternization Guidelines run (or ran, there've been changes and she's hardly current), but when you go up against what the Teams do on the other side of the Gate, the Guidelines had to bend a little in the face of reality. Because the Teams aren't just Teams, they're families, the only place you can go to talk about, to share, the burden of what you find Out There.

Of course they'd be here. They're supposed to be her family now.

"So how was Washington?" McCluskey asks.

"General Landry was so pleased with what I had to tell him that I got to repeat it to an emergency meeting of the Select Committee on Homeworld Security," she says. "Who asked me if I was mistaken. If I'd misunderstood. If I'd been misinformed. Well how the _hell_ do _I_ know if I've been misinformed? The Jaffa and the _Tok'ra_ have both been lying to us for years and are lying to us now: how's that for misinformed? Oh, I know. Why don't we all just wait until Ereshkigal comes here and can brief them herself? That way they'll have first-hand intelligence and can stop bothering me." Her voice is high and brittle with anger.

"Jesus," Hicks says reverently.

"All we can ever do is give them the best information we can get," McCluskey says. "What they do with it isn't up to us." Jack said that many times. Much less philosophically.

"Usually they ignore it," Dani says bitterly.

A few minutes later Major Hamilton deploys plates of French Toast all round, served up on Dani's second-best (now _only_ ) china as they sit at her dining room table. White damask over antique cherry, linen napkins, and bone china (someone's been busy, to get all of this unpacked and laid out); it's far too formal for the space, but it's all she has. There are Mimosas to go with it, since there's champagne, though nobody will admit to providing it -- and the combination of alcohol and sugar gives her a last bright flare of energy that she knows is the outrider of a crash of gargantuan proportions. She'll probably be in a coma for days.

They all seem so relieved she's here. It's -- she searches for the precise word -- _disorienting_. As if they've mistaken her for someone else. And that they're here at all borders on the surreal. She knows how this should go -- all the relationships, the connections -- especially here, in the place where it's gone that way, though with other people -- and it isn't. Maybe it's just too soon. But she knows all the steps to going from an assortment of strangers to a team closer than blood kin. It's true that SG-35 isn't SG-1, but she's worked with other SG teams in the past. She's formed other bonds.

Not here. Not now. Something's missing. Maybe she's just tired.

But at least consciousness lasts long enough for her to see her first guests out. The Colonel actually lives not far from here, and Hicks and Hamilton will be taking advantage of on-Base accommodations because of the weather. The roads near Cheyenne Mountain are always kept clear.

Then she and John are alone. First night in the new house. (Old house.) "Okay," she says. The dishwasher's loaded. She sets it running. "Yell at me now," she says, turning around and leaning back against the counter.

"Why?" He's standing facing her. Not very far away.

"Stupid. Should have called. Should have turned my phone on. Just..."

"You were tired, and you hate Washington, and you hate flying. And when you get really rattled, you just... don't... think. Never have." His voice is soft, though, and he doesn't seem angry. Outside, at the car, yes. Not now.

"Do," she protests.

"Don't."

"I _do_ think."

"Eventually."

"I got here."

"Also eventually."

"I think they know we're living together." She's so tired her mind's skipping from idea to idea, but this one seems important.

He chuckles. "I think they know a lot more than that, sweetheart. Hamilton helped me put the bed back together, and, you know, there's only the one bedroom set up. He's got that degree from Harvard. He might figure things out."

She sways forward giddily. He catches her. "We're--" _Totally screwed._

"Going to bed. Might finish the spiked orange juice first. Shame to let it go to waste. Besides ... vitamins."

"You're just trying to get me drunk."

"Trying to build up your tolerance. You need to be able to go out drinking with hard-assed Marine Colonels. Win her respect."

"I bet she sleeps in a fluffy pink negligee." All of them know where John sleeps now.

"Something neither of us will ever know."

"Oh, god, I hope not."

And the thought of Mary Margaret Perline McCluskey, Colonel, USMC, in a fluffy pink negligee suddenly strikes her as excruciatingly funny. So much so she starts to giggle helplessly, and then suddenly in the middle of it she's sobbing as if her heart were breaking, because it's all too much: Washington, then being here, and the fitting-not-fitting with SG-35. She doesn't know what she wants, what she should want, what she'll be allowed to have, what she deserves, and Time and Causality are turning back upon themselves -- one more time -- like the Worm Oroborus, the future biting the tail of its past with savage force. Worms. Snakes. _Goa'uld_ Queens.

She doesn't entirely remember making it to bed.

Later -- after a few hours sleep -- she makes an abbreviated report -- by phone -- to Sammy. Tomorrow she'll go in and make a full report. It's after noon when she wakes up for the second time. Familiar furniture -- her bed's the bigger of the two, so it's the one they moved -- but the room... Well, it's not as if she hasn't woken up staring at this ceiling before. It's just that Jack was on Edora then. And now John is -- presumably -- somewhere else in the house.

She gets up and pokes around. A lot of her clothes have already been unpacked, and hers and his hang side-by-side in the closet. She feels a faint sense of unease, though certainly she's shared a closet with a man before. (With her husband.) And if she hadn't wanted this with John, she shouldn't have asked him to live here, should she? Or had she hoped he'd refuse, and take the responsibility of choice from her? If that was what she'd hoped for, she'd been even stupider than usual. She knows John loves her. John's _in love_ with her. (Which is different.) So she dresses, and goes to see if he's here, or if -- with the vitality of youth -- however ambiguous -- he's gone to the Mountain.

But he is, in fact, here. Sitting on the floor, surrounded by boxes, setting things to rights in his new study. Not one of the rooms she ever spent much time in; it's an open space as large as the garage below it. His couch is here, too. She'd wondered where that'd gotten to. Not down in the living room, that's for sure; it's just as crowded by monster television, piano, and her couch as she thought it would be. They'll be moving furniture around to make it fit the space for weeks to come.

He looks up and sees her, and when he smiles, all she feels is panic. And she knows, as surely as if she's reading about it in a mission report, the abnormality of her reaction means there's something here that has to be dealt with before it kills someone beyond the Gate. Because that's where she goes. And what she's feeling isn't right. But for now she pushes her emotions aside and goes over to him. Reaches down when he reaches up, and twines her fingers through his.

"Still snowing," he says. "The others are lucky they got out when they did. We'll be lucky to get in tomorrow."

"The SUV--" she says, and stops. The SUV's still at the airport. And the rental car's still ... out there somewhere.

"The Jeep will make it," he says. "And when the roads get plowed out, you can drive the rental to the airport and pick up your car."

By which time she may owe enough in rental fees she might as well _keep_ it. "How's the unpacking coming?" She hasn't dared look at her own office.

"Might be done by May. A lot of stuff in storage to go through, too. But the condo's empty. Sit." He tugs, and she sits on the floor beside him.

"Why are we sitting on the floor?"

"Because _I_ was sitting on the floor, trying to find _The Manual of Mechanical Chemistry, Eighth Edition_. And because it's a lot harder for you to run away down here when I ask you about Washington."

She tenses, but he's got an arm around her shoulders and doesn't let go. "I said."

"You also had violent hysterics and then passed out."

_Oh. That._ She doesn't want to tell the truth, and she doesn't want to lie. And he knows every evasion she can think of to try.

"Please, Dani." She closes her eyes, trying to imagine how to explain. _Trying._ He runs the knuckles of his free hand gently along her cheek. Jack-not-Jack. Jack would already know.

"It was dying by inches," she says. Not talking about this trip. "You know how well I did in Academia. They never wanted the truth there. Just... a kind of compliance. You know I never managed it at twenty-five. We all thought of it as the whole world -- Steven, David ... Simon ... and I, everyone I knew from those days -- but in Washington, the stakes are higher. More money. Real power. Your name in the news -- at least for some people. Getting to be President. Ambassadorships, Consular appointments, that sort of thing. Ten years later I'd seen three Galaxies, but I wasn't ready for Foggy Bottom. Nobody there wanted the truth either. At least I knew that going in. But I thought... Never mind."

"You thought they'd leave you alone," John says.

"I don't know what I thought. I knew I was ... Jack's ... political hostess. He had to have one, _quelle surprise_ ; I don't think he'd quite realized that when he stepped up. But he wasn't going to ... survive ... without one. I'd done the same job offworld more times than I could count. But at least we got to go home at the end of those. And some of the time we had something to show for our trouble. There..." She stops.

#

"Diplomacy?" he offers. "Never was much good at being diplomatic." It hadn't been his job -- _O'Neill's_ job. O'Neill'd been there to keep them alive. Indy'd been the one supposed to assume everybody was her new best friend. Not much of a stretch for her back in the old days. Now? She doesn't trust people any more.

"Homeworld Security's a Cabinet-level post," she says, her voice even. "It's oversight for Atlantis, Area 51-and-2, and Space Command. It should have been straightforward -- a lot of paperwork. But -- we found out -- that's not how Washington runs. Washington runs on under-the-table deals. Who you know. Who you had drinks with last night. Who your wife plays bridge with on Wednesdays."

"You don't play bridge," he says.

"I do now. Oh, John, I do now."

He puts both arms around her. She buries her face against his neck as if she's just confessed a secret on the order of cannibalism or mass murder.

Bridge. Indiana was always lousy at card games. He beat her regularly at poker and gin -- at poker, because she had no poker face at all; at gin, because she never could manage to count the cards. (She could always take him at chess, though.) He tries to imagine Indiana as a proper Washington wife, making herself over out of a combination of love and duty into the thing both she and Carter hated so much: a woman whose main job was supporting her husband's career. He'd never quite gotten that: Sara'd always supported his -- O'Neill's -- career. He'd known -- they'd both known (when she married Captain O'Neill) -- married officers advanced faster than unmarried ones -- the higher-ups considered them more stable -- and there were all sorts of things officer's wives were expected to do. Sure, Sara bitched about some of them. He'd bitched about a lot of his job, too. But it was all part of the package, and they'd both gone into it eyes wide open. So when Carter and Indy snarled about 'female subjugation' he'd quickly learned to keep his opinions to himself. Like the opinion that every woman -- at least in America, on Earth -- had a choice, and if she wanted to stay home in a frilly apron and bake cookies, it was a free country last time he'd looked.

Only Indy hadn't exactly gotten a choice, had she? She'd sold herself into slavery -- or the next best thing, he knows it was in her mind -- without understanding what it would involve. Or -- to be perfectly accurate -- she'd thought she was getting married. And neither of them -- she _or_ Jack O'Neill -- realized what it would involve.

"So," he says. "This trip?" Because that's what this conversation's supposed to be about.

"Lieutenant General Jack O'Neill's sainted relict returns to the scene of his former glory to address the troops. Oh, Hank took me seriously. But the Select Committee... Dear little Dr. Jackson played bridge with their wives. Had them all over for drinks and dinners. Filled out the table at charity fundraisers. How the hell were they supposed to take me seriously? Offworld? Me? Oh, maybe years ago, but the General has to have... _Had_ to have... There are certain acceptable standards of behavior, you know, and..." Her voice falters to a stop.

"Crap." He kisses the side of her forehead; all he can reach at the moment. "Carter shouldn't have sent you."

"I'll be sure to tell her you said so."

"Dani, if you don't have ... credibility ... in Washington, there's no reason you ever have to go back."

She sighs. He feels her relax against him. "I have credibility with Hank. He might just reconsider the idea of having me talk to anybody else there, though."

"Ya think?" He knows she'd like to be amused but can't work up the emotional distance. At least she's starting to let him in. He thinks about his Other Self. O'Neill should have gotten her out of there. O'Neill should have left. He thinks about the two of them together -- not one of his favorite subjects, but for the last ten years he's actually had the luxury of not doing a lot of things he didn't want to do, and so he can do this now. She would've told The Other Guy everything was fine. He would've known it wasn't. But he would have pretended to believe her because the job -- the _mission_ \-- was too important to walk away from. So he'd sacrificed her to it and hated himself. Maybe hated her -- just a little bit -- for letting him do it. And she'd turned herself into something she'd despised, convinced -- if he knows his girl, and he does -- he'd despised what she'd become as much as she did. John knows better. He knows O'Neill (none better). O'Neill was proud of her. He'd hated the necessity of what they both had to do, but he'd always loved her competence. Seeing her transform herself always amazed him. It didn't matter how wacky the culture was they encountered on the other side of the Gate, she always found a way to ... fit. And seeing her transform herself again -- this last, most vital time... He would have been proud. Amazed. Grateful in a way for which there are -- were -- probably no words. Words were always her department.

And the time for words -- the words he would've been determined to find -- would have been later. Because -- John imagines -- O'Neill was engaged in as much of a balancing act as she was. And to tell her he guessed what she was doing, that he knew and understood and loved her for the ... _gift_ ... could have brought it all crashing down. When you're in the middle of a mission -- behind enemy lines, being tortured -- it's not the time to step back and evaluate the mechanics of your day-to-day survival, and they'd never gotten to the place where they could. She isn't ready to hear O'Neill's last words from John Nielsen yet. But he thinks -- now -- the day will come.

And then she'll finally -- really -- leave Washington.

"So," he says. "Breakfast? Lunch?"

"Lunch," she agrees. "Maybe some unpacking."

#


End file.
